---
title: Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation
url: https://www.emergentmind.com/papers/9604004
type: paper
arxiv_id: '9604004'
arxiv_url: https://arxiv.org/abs/9604004
published: '1996-04-12'
categories:
- cs.CL
---

# Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation

## Abstract

We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present evaluations of the system's performance along several different dimensions; these enable us to assess the contribution that each individual part is making to the success of the system as a whole, and thus prioritise the effort to be devoted to its further enhancement. Currently, the system is able to parse around 80% of sentences in a substantial corpus of general text containing a number of distinct genres. On a random sample of 250 such sentences the system has a mean crossing bracket rate of 0.71 and recall and precision of 83% and 84% respectively when evaluated against manually-disambiguated analyses.