<p><pre><code>    better at parsing the Penn Treebank than the best
    natural language parser for English on the Wall
    Street Journal
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m pretty sure &quot;the 20 year old Penn Treebank&quot; and &quot;the Wall Street Journal&quot; are referring to the same dataset here.  In the early 1990s the first large treebanking efforts were on a corpus from the WSJ, and they were released as the Penn Treebank: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;LDC95T7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;LDC95T7</a>  People report results on this dataset because that&#x27;s what the field has been testing on (and overfitting to) for decades.<p>(I worked on a successor project, OntoNotes, that involved additional treebank annotation on broader corpora: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;LDC2013T19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;LDC2013T19</a>)