A supervised technique uses relevance judgments to train a dependency parser such that it approximately optimizes Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) in information retrieval. A weighted tree edit distance between the parse tree for a query and the parse tree for a document is added to a ranking function, where the edit distance weights are parameters from the parser. Using parser parameters in the ranking function enables approximate optimization of the parser's parameters for NDCG by adding some constraints to the objective function.