Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Evaluations of Parsing Systems

A wide range of parser and/or grammar evaluation methods have been reported in the literature. However, in most cases these evaluations take the parsers independently (intrinsic evaluations), and only in a few cases has the effect of different parsers in real applications been measured (extrinsic evaluations). This paper compares two evaluations of the Link Grammar parser and the Conexor Functional Dependency Grammar parser. The parsing systems, despite both being dependency-based, return different types of dependencies, making a direct comparison impossible. In the intrinsic evaluation, the accuracy of the parsers is compared independently by converting the dependencies into grammatical relations and using the methodology of Carroll et al. (1998) for parser comparison. In the extrinsic evaluation, the parsers’ impact in a practical application is compared within the context of answer extraction. The differences in the results are significant.