An expectation based system, NGP, for parsing English noun groups into the Conceptual Dependency representation is described. The system is a part of English Language Interpreter (ELI) which is used as the front end to several natural language understanding systems and is capable of handling a wide range of sentences of considerable complexity. NGP processes the input from left to right, one word at a time, using linguistic and world knowledge to find the meaning of a noun group. Dictionary entries for individual words contain much of the program's knowledge. In addition, a limited ability for the handling of slightly incorrect sentences and unknown words is incorporated. (Author)