Evaluation of the Syntactic Analysis Component of an Information Extraction System for German

This paper describes two distinct evaluation initiatives on the NLP performance of smes (Saarbrücker Message Extraction System). The first study aimed at the improvement of smes used as analysis component of a German dialogue system for appointment scheduling. While the first scenario was mainly designed to test the overall analysis result, the second is concerned with a systematic evaluation of the NLP components of the core engine of the smes system. The morphological analysis, the disambiguation ability of the POS tagger as well as one of the various parsing modules are now under evaluation. Suitable reference material and supporting evaluation tools are being developed in parallel.