A text passage is analyzed to determine whether it contains a "be" verb or a "have" verb. If so, syntactic dependencies are obtained from the text passage, a direct object relation involving the "be" verb or "have" verb is obtained, and a verbal form of a noun appearing in the first direct object relation is obtained. The syntactic dependencies are rewritten based on the verbal form of the noun. Different syntactic rewriting criteria are applied if the text passage also contains a noun object preceding a past participle verb, or also contains an active present participle verb.