Is it really that difficult to parse German?

• DOI: 10.3115/1610075.1610093
• Publication Date: 2010-04-15T14:11:58Z
• Authors: Sandra Kübler; Erhard W. Hinrichs; Wolfgang Maier
• Keywords: Treebank; Lexicalization; Dependency grammar

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