Measuring efficiency in high-accuracy, broad-coverage statistical parsing

Very little attention has been paid to the comparison of efficiency between high accuracy statistical parsers. This paper proposes one machine-independent metric that is general enough to allow comparisons across very different parsing architectures. This metric, which we call ``events considered'', measures the number of ``events'', however they are defined for a particular parser, for which a probability must be calculated, in order to find the parse. It is applicable to single-pass or multi-stage parsers. We discuss the advantages of the metric, and demonstrate its usefulness by using it to compare two parsers which differ in several fundamental ways.