  Because of the wide variety of contemporary practices used in the automatic
syntactic parsing of natural languages, it has become necessary to analyze and
evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. This research is
all the more necessary because there are currently no genre- and
domain-independent parsers that are able to analyze unrestricted text with 100%
preciseness (I use this term to refer to the correctness of analyses assigned
by a parser). All these factors create a need for methods and resources that
can be used to evaluate and compare parsing systems. This research describes:
(1) A theoretical analysis of current achievements in parsing and parser
evaluation. (2) A framework (called FEPa) that can be used to carry out
practical parser evaluations and comparisons. (3) A set of new evaluation
resources: FiEval is a Finnish treebank under construction, and MGTS and RobSet
are parser evaluation resources in English. (4) The results of experiments in
which the developed evaluation framework and the two resources for English were
used for evaluating a set of selected parsers.
