This document discusses probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) for parsing natural language. It notes some limitations of vanilla PCFGs, including their inability to resolve ambiguities requiring semantic context. It emphasizes the importance of lexicalization, where productions are conditioned on part-of-speech tags and head words. The document also discusses techniques like non-terminal splitting to better model contextual dependencies, and discriminative parse reranking to select the best parse from an N-best list using global features.