Principles of Evaluation in Natural Language Processing

In this special issue of TAL, we look at the fundamental principles underlying evaluation in natural language processing. We adopt a global point of view that goes beyond the horizon of a single evaluation campaign or a particular protocol. After a brief review of history and terminology, we will address the topic of a gold standard for natural language processing, of annotation quality, of the amount of data, of the difference between technology evaluation and usage evaluation, of dialog systems, and of standards, before concluding with a short discussion of the articles in this special issue and some prospective remarks.