In this paper, we propose a new ambiguity representation scheme; Structure Preference
Relation (SPR), which consists of useful quantitative distribution information for ambiguous
structures. Two automatic acquisition algorithms, the first acquired from a treebank, and
the second acquired from raw texts, are introduced, and some experimental results which
prove the availability of the algorithms are also given. Finally, we introduce some SPR
applications in linguistics and natural language processing, such as preference-based parsing
and the discovery of representative ambiguous structures, and propose some future research
directions.