Dominique Estival

TSNLP: Test Suites for Natural Language Processing

The growing language technology industry needs measurement tools to allow researchers, engineers, managers, and customers to track development, evaluate and assure quality, and assess suitability for a variety of applications.The TSNLP (Test Suites for Natural Language Processing) project has investigated various aspects of the construction, maintenance and application of systematic test suites as diagnostic and evaluation tools for NLP applications. The paper summarizes the motivation and main results of TSNLP: besides the solid methodological foundation of the project, TSNLP has produced substantial (i.e. larger than any existing general test suites) multi-purpose and multi-user test suites for three European languages together with a set of specialized tools that facilitate the construction, extension, maintenance, retrieval, and customization of the test data.The publicly available results of TSNLP represent a valuable linguistic resource that has the potential of providing a wide-spread pre-standard diagnostic and evaluation tool for both developers and users of NLP applications.

Reversible Grammars and their Application in Machine Translation

Recent work in the unification framework has shown that a formalism based on unification is particularly well-suited for declarative modes of problem-solving. On the other hand, a declarative mode allows the construction of grammars which can be be neutral as to the processes applying to them, whether parser or generator.’