VERB recognised as AUX in simple sentence with en_core_web_* models

[DavidGerva]

I came across this strange behavior of the spacy models.
This simple sentence:
"Insect-mediated transmission of viruses is a threat"

gives this output in displacy both with the small and the large models:

I know models are not perfect. But this is a behavior I often find with "to be" verbs. So I ask:

• is this something that makes sense to report to spacy or not?
• is this an expected output I have to handle in some way?

thank you

[polm]

This is an unfortunate but known limitation of the English models due to the underlying training data not really making an AUX/VERB distinction and the Universal Dependencies definition of the distinction not always being clear anyway. You can read more about it here.