How to refer back to the just mentioned subject?

Question

I wrote:

Syntactic parsing is a basic task in natural language processing and the grammar plays a crucial role in this ??.

First I would like to know how to fill the gap (??). I thought of "regard", "respect", "task", "ground", or nothing and just "this".

Second I don't know if I should use "the grammar" or "grammars" or maybe "grammar" here.

Syntactic parsing is a basic task in natural language processing and grammar plays a crucial role in such task. — Ghaith Alrestom, Aug 3 '16 at 7:05
I think, in this context,grammar is [uncountabel]. Did you already talk about the importance of grammar? If so, I would say there is no problem with using "the". — Cardinal, Aug 3 '16 at 7:20
Note that you don't really have to include in this (task). This is complete enough for me: Syntactic parsing is a basic task in natural language processing and grammar plays a crucial role. (I expect that you're going to write more about how grammar plays such an important role right after this sentence, though.) — Damkerng T., Aug 3 '16 at 7:48
Grammar plays a crucial role in the basic task of syntactic parsing of natural language. — Tᴚoɯɐuo, Aug 3 '16 at 11:08

someasw · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-03 07:03:20Z

I would omit both the "the" (since you refer to grammar in general) and the "??". You could maybe even use a comma, so that the sentence could be:

Syntactic parsing is a basic task in natural language processing, and grammar plays a crucial role in this.

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