  Natural language understanding programs get bogged down by the multiplicity
of possible syntactic structures while processing real world texts that human
understanders do not have much difficulty with. In this work, I analyze the
relationships between parsing strategies, the degree of local ambiguity
encountered by them, and semantic feedback to syntax, and propose a parsing
algorithm called {\em Head-Signaled Left Corner Parsing} (HSLC) that minimizes
local ambiguities while supporting interactive syntactic and semantic analysis.
Such a parser has been implemented in a sentence understanding program called
COMPERE.
