User:Ilnar.salimzyan/On testing

Test-driven language pair development or on testing strategy in Apertium
========================================================================

Some terminology
----------------

# Acceptance tests define when a language pair or a particular sub-module (like
# morphological transducer or CG) are done. That is, they define the
# requirements for what you are going to develop and are written in the process
# of communicating with "stakeholders"/mentors or anyone funding the
# development. Therefore it's good if anything from this category is wiki-based/
# easy to edit.

# Unit tests are written by programmers for programmers. They describe how the
# system works and what the structure and behavior of the code is.

# Integration tests, as the name suggests, test whether components (in our case,
# these are modules like morphological transducers, disambiguators, lexical
# selection rules and transfer rules) are successfully integrated into a system
# (=language pair). In case of a language pair, you can think of the acceptance
# tests for that language pair as integration tests, since they test how modules
# of the language pair integrate into a complete machine translation system.

Overview
--------

                    Testing an Apertium MT system
                            /         \
                           /           \
                          /             \
                     Acceptance       Unit tests
                       tests               |
                       /             testing the output
                      /              of each module
                     /                     |
      * Regression-Pending tests      Morphological--Acceptance: * recall or coverage            
              on the wiki              transducers               * precision
      * Corpus test                        |      \              * # of stems
         * upper bound for WER             |       --Unit: * morphophonology
         * upper bounds for [*@#]          |               * morphotactics
                 errors              ConstraintGr----Acceptance: * ambig. rate before&after 
      * Testvoc (has to be clean)          |   \                 * precision
                                           |    \                * # of rules
                  +                        |     ----Unit: * INPUT/OUTPUT comments for each
                                           |                      rule
               numbers:                  Lexical-----Acceptance: * ambig. rate before&after 
      * of stems in the bidix           selection                * precision
      * of lrx rules <-> ambiguity         |    \               * # of rules
         rate before and after             |     ----Unit: * INPUT/OUTPUT comments for each
      * transfer rules                     |                      rule
                                       Transfer------Acceptance: * wiki tests for phrases and
                 +                            \                       sentences
                                               \                  * "testvoc-lite" tests for           
        (gisting evaluation)                    \                      single-words
                                                 ----Unit: * INPUT/OUTPUT comments in the headers
                                                                   of rules

Cheat sheet

In apertium-tat-rus

Command	When
./qa.sh t1x	apertium-tat-rus.tat-rus.t1x changed
./qa.sh t2x	apertium-tat-rus.tat-rus.t2x changed
./qa.sh t3x	apertium-tat-rus.tat-rus.t3x changed
./qa.sh t4x	apertium-tat-rus.tat-rus.t4x changed
./qa.sh	Before commiting
./qa.sh corp	Corpus test ('./qa.sh' will do this)
./wiki-tests.sh Regression tat rus [update]	'update' if Tatar and Russian/Regression tests page changed (./qa.sh will do this (without updating))
./qa.sh testvoc reg	currently local tests in testvoc/lite/regression.txt ('./qa.sh' will do this)

In other words, './qa.sh' is supposed to run essential tests at each commit/build time. Currently it runs lightened up versions of the acceptance tests for the machine translator, but probably should run all the unit tests (./qa t1x etc) as well (they run fast).

My plan is to have './qa.sh full' test to run all tests (including testvoc-lite) once in a while.

In apertium-kaz

Command	When
./wiki-tests Regression kaz kaz [update]	Before committing 'update' if apertium-kaz/Regression tests page changed

To automate

• yaml tests

<selimcan> I was thinking of at least keeping a list of lexicons which stems can continue with
           (i.e. directly) separate in lexc
<selimcan> giving examples for each
<selimcan> I mean, right before the stems section, a litst of N1, N2, N-RUS, V-TV, etc
<selimcan> *list
<selimcan> with short comment and examples for each
<selimcan> Lexicon : Description : Example 
<selimcan>  N1 :  commoun nouns : бақша
<selimcan>  N5 : nouns loaned from Russian (often don't obey the syngarmonism laws, that's why
            should be kept separate) : актив 
<selimcan>  N-COMPUND-PX : compound nouns with 3p possessive at the last noun
<selimcan> firespeaker, you know, like we do for adjectives, but for only lexicons we have
<selimcan> err, "for all lexicons" I mean
<selimcan> That kind of comments for all lexicons (stems can link to) we have, and in one place,
           so that whoever adding stems to the lexicon doesn't have to look at the entire morphology
           description in lexc
<selimcan> Plus a full paradigm of one example word linking to that lexicon in
           apertium-foo/tests/morphotactics or somewhere else (useful for testvoc and potentially for 
           automatically guessing the paradigm)