Verification And Validation Of Language Processing Systems: Is It Evaluation?


If Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are viewed as intelligent systems then we should be able to make use of verification and validation (V&amp;V) approaches and methods that have been developed in the intelligent systems community. This paper addresses language engineering infrastructure issues by considering whether standard V&amp;V methods are fundamentally different than the evaluation practices commonly used for NLP systems, and proposes practical approaches for applying V&amp;V in the context of language processing systems. We argue that evaluation, as it is performed in the NL community, can be improved by supplementing it with methods from the V&amp;V community.