  We describe an efficient bottom-up parser that interleaves syntactic and
semantic structure building. Two techniques are presented for reducing search
by reducing local ambiguity: Limited left-context constraints are used to
reduce local syntactic ambiguity, and deferred sortal-constraint application is
used to reduce local semantic ambiguity. We experimentally evaluate these
techniques, and show dramatic reductions in both number of chart-edges and
total parsing time. The robust processing capabilities of the parser are
demonstrated in its use in improving the accuracy of a speech recognizer.
