Parse out phrasal verbs

Question

Has anyone ever tried parsing out phrasal verbs with Stanford NLP? The problem is with separable phrasal verbs, e.g.: climb up, do over: We climbed that hill up. I have to do this job over.

The first phrase looks like this in the parse tree:

(VP 
    (VBD climbed)
    (ADVP 
        (IN that) 
        (NP (NN hill)
        )
    ) 
    (ADVP 
        (RB up)
    )
) 

the second phrase:

(VB do) 
   (NP 
     (DT this) 
     (NN job)
   ) 
(PP 
   (IN over)
) 

So it seems like reading the parse tree would be the right way, but how to know that verb is going to be phrasal?

Answer 1

Dependency parsing, dude. Look at the prt (phrasal verb particle) dependency in both sentences. See the Stanford typed dependencies manual for more info.

nsubj(climbed-2, We-1)
root(ROOT-0, climbed-2)
det(hill-4, that-3)
dobj(climbed-2, hill-4)
prt(climbed-2, up-5)

nsubj(have-2, I-1)
root(ROOT-0, have-2)
aux(do-4, to-3)
xcomp(have-2, do-4)
det(job-6, this-5)
dobj(do-4, job-6)
prt(do-4, over-7)

The stanford parser gives you very nice dependency parses. I have code for programmatically accessing these if you need it: https://gist.github.com/2562754