A dependency parser analyzes the grammatical structure of a sentence, establishing relationships between "head" words and words which modify those heads.
J. Gillenwater, K. Ganchev, J. Graca, F. Pereira, and B. Taskar. Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers, page 194--199. Stroudsburg, PA, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (2010)