Experiments in German Treebank Parsing

State-of-the-art parsers for English are based on probabilistic grammars induced from treebanks. German, a language with a free-er word order and a richer morphology, is likely to pose new problems to techniques developed especially for English. This paper describes one of the first parsing experiments using probabilistic context-free grammars extracted from the German treebank NEGRA. Particularly, we introduce "partial-parent encoding" for NEGRA, a variant of the parent-encoding technique. Evaluation shows that grammatical functions, and partial-parent encoding improve the performance of a parser for German. Moreover, we find evidence that extending the size of the treebank as well as adding more linguistic information will improve the results.