I've tried part-of-speech tagging and subjectively it doesn't seem to help much. POS taggers for English are a solved problem, so it can be done automatically,

I've tried part-of-speech tagging and subjectively it doesn't seem to help much. POS taggers for English are a solved problem, so it can be done automatically, but for prototyping I tried marking up some text myself. Indeed what helped the most were the verbs (vs other parts of speech), but it still didn't seem to be worth doing. Also marginally helpful was to delimit noun / verb phrases with 2 spaces instead of one.