be used for efficiency by providing a best-first search heuristic to order the parsing agenda. This paper proposes an agenda-based probabilistic chart parsing algorithm which is both robust and efficient. The algorithm, 7)icky 1, is considered robust because it will potentially generate all constituents produced by a pure bottom-up parser and rank these constituents by likelihood. The efficiency of the algorithm is achieved through a technique called probabilistic prediction, which helps the algorithm avoid worst-case behavior. .