Abstract
Recently, there have been various attempts to set up a test suite covering the syntactic
phenomena of a natural language (cp. [Flickinger et al. 1989], [Nerbonne et al. 1993]).
The latest effort is the TSNLP project (Test Suite for Natural Language Processing)
within the Linguistic Research and Engineering (LRE) framework sponsored by the
European Union (cp. [Balkan et al. 1994]). These test suites are meant for the testing of
NLP software regarding their coverage of syntactic phenomena. [Volk 1995] showed that
a well-organised test suite can also be used to support incremental grammar development
and grammar documentation. The key issues in the organisation of a test suite are the
ease of extensibility and interchangeability as well as the avoidance of redundancy. We
have implemented a test suite, which is optimized for the avoidance of redundancy and
we report on the trade-off for extensibility and interchangeability.
Volk, Martin