The task of language engineering is to develop the technology for building computer systems which can perform useful linguistic tasks such as machine assisted translation, text retrieval, message classification and document summarisation. Such systems often require the use of a parser which can extract specific types of grammatical data from pre-defined classes of input text. There are many parsers already available for use in language engineering systems. However, many different linguistic formalisms and parsing algorithms are employed. Grammatical coverage varies, as does the nature of the syntactic information extracted. Direct comparison between systems is difficult because each is likely to have been evaluated using different test criteria. In this volume, eight different parsers are applied to the same task, that of analysing a set of sentences derived from software instruction manuals. Each parser is presented in a separate chapter. Evaluation of performance is carried out using a standard set of criteria with the results being presented in a set of tables which have the same format for each system. Three additional chapters provide further analysis of the results as well as discussing possible approaches to the standardisation of parse tree data. Five parse trees are provided for each system in an appendix, allowing further direct comparison between systems by the reader. The book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of computational linguistics, computer science, information retrieval, language engineering, linguistics and machine assisted translation.
