Verb phrases are sometimes omitted in natural language (ellipsis). It is necessary to resolve the verb phrase ellipses in language understanding, machine translation, and dialogue processing. This paper describes a practical way to resolve verb phrase ellipses by using surface expressions and examples. To make heuristic rules for ellipsis resolution we classified verb phrase ellipses by checking whether the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis appears in the surrounding sentences or not. We experimented with the resolution of verb phrase elipses on a novel and obtained a recall rate of 73% and a precision rate of 66% on test sentences. In the case when the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis appeared in the surrounding sentences, the accuracy rate was high. But, in the case when the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis did not appear in the surrounding sentences, the accuracy rate was not so high. Since the analysis of this phenomena is very difficult, it is valuable to propose a way of solving the problem to a certain extent. When the size of corpus becomes larger and the machine performance becomes greater, the method of using corpus will become effective.