In this paper we introduce an example-based parser for Chinese. One strong point of the parsers is its high reliability. We propose a formal definition for reliability and derive from it K as a metric for the evaluation of parsers. In a row of experiments we try to identify some factors which support the reliability of the parser. It is suggested that these factors are independent of the parsing approach and can be realized in TAGs. 1. Introduction Example-based parsers adhere to the lazy learning algorithm while converting tree-bank entries into a parser. So-called treebank grammars, (Bod, 1992; Charniak, 1996) are eager learners, i.e. they abstract knowledge structures or statistical information from the treebank and reason on the basis of these abstractions. Explanation-based parsing is a different eager learning approach aiming at the extraction of specialized grammars out of a general-purpose grammars on the bases of parsing examples (Rayner & Christer, 1994; Srivinas & Joshi, 1...