AutoEval and Missplel: Two Generic Tools for Automatic Evaluation

We describe two freeware programs for automatic evaluation. The first, AutoEval, greatly simplifies the data gathering, processing and counting often involved in an evaluation. To this end, AutoEval includes a simple and powerful script language to describe the evaluation task to be carried out. The second program is called Missplel. It introduces human-like spelling and grammar errors into text. A typical application is evaluation of NLP system performance on noisy input, in order to establish the robustness of the system. An evaluation of the quality of the produced errors has also been conducted.