A Quantitative Comparison Between an LR Parser and an ATN Interpreter

We have known that a bottom-up parser will parse an English sentence faster than a top-down parser does. Nevertheless, there is still no report on how much faster it is. To quantitatively compare these two parsers, an LR parser and an ATN interpreter are built and are used as bottom-up and top-down parsers respectively. These two parsers are currently widely used in the computational linguistics community. From the tests we have proceeded, we find that the average parsing speed of the LR parser is tens of times faster than that of the ATN interpreter.