The only approaches I'm aware of are in the context of text simplification systems. I am aware only of two such systems and only of English/Portuguese.<br>One is Canning's part of the PSET system (for English newspaper articles), which treats re-writing only agentive passive phrases into active ones (as they are the only ones which are considered to be able to be identified):<br>
<br>Canning, Y. (2002) Syntactic Simplification of Text. PhD. Theses, University of Sunderland. <br><br>And the other one is Gasperin et al., 2009 system (newspaper articles for Brasilian Portuguese)<br><br>Gasperin, C.; Maziero, E.; Specia, L.; Pardo, T.S.P.; Aluisio, S.M. (2009b). Natural language processing for social inclusion: a text simplification architecture for different literacy levels. XXXVI Seminário Integrado de Software e Hardware (SEMISH2009), pp. 387401. Bento Gonçalves, Brazil. <br>
Gasperin, C.; Specia, L.; Pereira, T.; Aluisio, S.M. (2009a). Learning When to Simplify Sentences for Natural Text Simplification. Encontro Nacional de Inteligência Artificial (ENIA2009), pp. 809818. Bento Gonçalves, Brazil. <br>
<br>As far as I know only passive phrases with explicit markers are treated. You can have a look at the list of rules they used. For the Brasilian Portuguese you can contact Dr. Lucia Specia (<a href="mailto:l.specia@wlv.ac.uk">l.specia@wlv.ac.uk</a>).<br>
<br>Regards,<br><br>Irina<br><br>Irina Temnikova, B.A., M.A.<br><br>PhD Student in Computational Linguistics<br>Editorial Assistant of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering<br>PC Coordinator for the International Conference RANLP 2011<br>
Organiser of the Student Research Workshop at RANLP 2011<br><br>Research Group in Computational Linguistics<br>Research Institute of Information and Language Processing<br>University of Wolverhampton<br>Stafford St.<br>Wolverhampton WV1 1SB<br>
Telephone + 44 1902 321629<br>Fax +44 1902 323543<br><br>Email <a href="mailto:i.temnikova2@wlv.ac.uk">i.temnikova2@wlv.ac.uk</a>,<br><a href="mailto:irina.temnikova@gmail.com">irina.temnikova@gmail.com</a> <br>Website: <a href="http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in0290/">http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in0290/</a><br>
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Message: 2<br>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:19:04 +0100<br>
From: "iain" <<a href="mailto:iain@idcl.co.uk">iain@idcl.co.uk</a>><br>
Subject: [Corpora-List] Active vs Passive voice<br>
To: "Corpora List" <<a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</a>><br>
<br>
Can anyone point me to resources on active vs. passive voice detection?<br>
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There seem to be simple patterns which would detect many passives (noun - be<br>
- past participle or something like that), but I'm wondering if there's any<br>
work done (or better yet source code available!) on more general detection?<br>
<br>
<br>
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Thanks<br>
<br>
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<br>
Iain<br>
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