Development and evaluation of a broad-coverage probabilistic grammar of English-language computer manuals

We present an approach to grammar development where the task is decomposed into two separate subtasks. The first task is linguistic, with the goal of producing a set of rules that have a large coverage (in the sense that the correct parse is among the proposed parses) on a blind test set of sentences. The second task is statistical, with the goal of developing a model of the grammar which assigns maximum probability for the correct parse. We give parsing results on text from computer manuals.