The RASP parser is based on a manually constructed POS tag-sequence grammar, with a statistical parse selection component and a robust 1 One obvious omission is any form of dependency parser (McDonald et al., 2005;Nivre and Scholz, 2004).
the dependencies returned by these parsers are local, and it would be non-trivial to infer from a series of links whether a long-range dependency had been correctly represented.