Multi-purpose vs. Task-specific Application:

In this paper we report on ongoing verification and evaluation 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 orientated language technology (LT) components for the purpose of supporting or even reorganising the documentation production chain along several diagnostic dimensions such as the process proper, and the quality and the translatability of the process' output. In this application scenario, LT components shall control and ensure that predefined criteria are applicable and measurable to the documentation end-product as well as to the information objects that form the building blocks of the endproduct. A prerequisite for the evaluation process is the thorough definition of these dimensions in terms of user requirements and LT developer requirements. The output quality then is the pivot where user requirements and developer requirements meet. For this, it turned out that a so-called "braided" evaluation strategy is very well suited to include both views. This strategy is also more adequate for our industrial framework, since the ultimate goal of any system development should aim at the effective matching of developer orientated objectives and the specific needs and demands of the intended users.