an especially good application domain for an ebl is natural language processing (nlp). here a rich domain theory, i.e., a natural language grammar---although neither perfect nor complete, is tuned to a particular application or particular language usage, using a treebank (training examples). rayner pioneered this work. the first successful industrial application was to a commercial nl interface to relational databases. the method has been successfully applied to several large-scale natural language parsing systems, where the utility problem was solved by omitting the original grammar (domain theory) and using specialized lr-parsing techniques, resulting in huge speed-ups, at a cost in coverage, but with a gain in disambiguation.