The Use of Instrumentation in Grammar Engineering

This paper explores the uscfitlness of a technique from software engineering, (:ode instrumentation, fbr the development of large-scale natural language grammars. Infi)rmation about the usage of grammar rules in test and corpus sentences is used to improve grammar and testsuite, as well as adapting a grammar to a specific genre. Results show that less than half of a large-coverage grammar for German is actually tested by two large testsuites, and that 10 30% of testing time is redundant. This mefiodology applied can be seen as a re-use of grammar writing knowledge tbr testsniCe compilation. The construction of genre-specific grammars results in perfbrmance gains of a factor of four