Freer-word-order languages such as German exhibit linguistic phenomena that present unique challenges to traditional CFG parsing. Such phenomena produce discontinuous constituents, which are not naturally modelled by projective phrase structure trees. In this paper, we examine topological field parsing, a shallow form of parsing which identifies the major sections of a sentence in relation to the clausal main verb and the subordinating heads. We report the results of topological field parsing of German using the unlexicalized, latent variable-based Berkeley parser (Petrov et al., 2006) Without any language- or model-dependent adaptation, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the TuBa-D/Z corpus, and a modified NE-GRA corpus that has been automatically annotated with topological fields (Becker and Frank, 2002). We also perform a qualitative error analysis of the parser output, and discuss strategies to further improve the parsing results.
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