Evaluating Language Technologies: The MULTIDOC Approach to Taming the Knowledge Soup

In this paper we report on ongoing verification and validation work within the MULTIDOC project. This project is situated in the field of multilingual automotive product documentation. One central task is the evaluation of existing off-the-shelf and research based language technology (LT) products and components for the purpose of supporting or even reorganising the documentation production chain along three diagnostic dimensions: the process proper, the documentation quality and the translatability of the process output. In this application scenario, LT components shall control and ensure that predefined quality criteria are applicable and measurable to the documentation end-product as well as to the information objects that form the basic building blocks of the end-product. In this scenario, multilinguality is of crucial importance. It shall be introduced or prepared, and maintained as early as possible in the documentation workflow to ensure a better and faster translation process. A prerequisite for the evaluation process is the thorough definition of these dimensions in terms of user quality requirements and LT developer quality requirements. In our approach, we define the output quality of the whole documentation process as the pivot where user requirements and developer requirements shall meet. For this, it turned out that a so-called "braided" diagnostic evaluation is very well suited to cover both views. Since no generally approved standards or even valid specifications for standards exist for the evaluation of LT products, we have adjusted existing standards for the evaluation of software products, in particular ISO 9001, ISO 9000-3, ISO/IEC 12119, ISO 9004 and ISO 9126. This is feasible because an LT product consists of a software part and a lingware part. The adaptation had to be accomplished for the latter part.