• DOI:10.3115/1610075.1610093
• Corpus ID: 8934339

Is it Really that Difficult to Parse German?

@inproceedings{Kbler2006IsIR,
  title={Is it Really that Difficult to Parse German?},
  author={Sandra K{\"u}bler and Erhard W. Hinrichs and Wolfgang Maier},
  booktitle={Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year={2006}
}

• Sandra Kübler, E. Hinrichs, Wolfgang Maier
• Published in
  Conference on Empirical…
  22 July 2006
• Computer Science

This paper presents a comparative study of probabilistic treebank parsing of German, using the Negra and TuBa-D/Z tree-banks. Experiments with the Stanford parser, which uses a factored PCFG and dependency model, show that, contrary to previous claims for other parsers, lexicalization of PCFG models boosts parsing performance for both treebanks. The experiments also show that there is a big difference in parsing performance, when trained on the Negra and on the TuBa-D/Z treebanks. Parser performance for the models trained on TuBa-D/Z are comparable to parsing results for English with the Stanford parser, when trained on the Penn treebank. This comparison at least suggests that German is not harder to parse than its West-Germanic neighbor language English.