This i)al)er describes a Ilatural language i)ars ing algorith,n for unrestricted text which uses a prol)al)ility-I~ased scoring function to select the "l)est" i)arse of a sclfl,ence. The parser, T~earl, is a time-asynchronous I)ottom-ul) chart parser with Earley-tyl)e tol)-down prediction which l)ur sues the highest-scoring theory iu the chart, where the score of a theory represents tim extent t o which the context of the sentence predicts that interpretation.