Abstract. For casual web users, a natural language is more accessible than formal query languages. However, understanding of a natural language query is not trivial for computer systems. This paper proposes a method to parse and understand Korean natural language queries with local grammars. A local grammar is a formalism that can model syntactic structures and synonymous phrases. With local grammars, the system directly extracts user’s intentions from natural language queries. With 163 hand-crafted local grammar graphs, the system could attain a good level of accuracy and meaningful coverage over IT company/people domain.