Automatic test suite generation for PMCFG grammars

Other conference contribution, 2018

We present a method for finding errors in formalized natural language grammars, by automatically and systematically generating test cases that are intended to be judged by a human oracle. The method works on a per-construction basis; given a construction from the grammar, it generates a finite but complete set of test sentences (typically tens or hundreds), where that construction is used in all possible ways. Our method is an alternative to using a corpus or a treebank, where no such completeness guarantees can be made. The method is language-independent and is implemented for the grammar formalism
PMCFG, but also works for weaker grammar formalisms. We evaluate the method on a number of different grammars for different natural languages, with sizes ranging from toy examples to real-world grammars.