I just hate n-grams is the short answer - tear apart the input with link, use arc and modifier info as input to the statistical processes - so far, too early to say it works better, but sure as hell its more interesting . :-) . Sadly I have to keep my instances running all the time, they eat all of the public Reuters news feeds - side note - additional info can be obtained by taking the top N parse candidates for a given sentence and collapsing them into a graph - I have a pretty good signal out of that for 'the parser has gone insane'