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  • Property-based test for par...
    Jin, Shuo; Chen, Songqiang; Xie, Xiaoyuan

    2021 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 11/2021
    Conference Proceeding

    Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging for sentences is a basic and widely-used Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique. People rely heavily on it to predict POS tags that serve as the base for many advanced NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, word sense disambiguation, and information retrieval. However, POS tagging tools could make wrong predictions, which bring consequent error propagation to the advanced tasks and even cause serious threats in critical application domains. In this paper, we propose to test POS tagging tools with Metamorphic Testing against some properties that they should follow. The preliminary exploration with two groups of Metamorphic Relations shows that our method can effectively reveal defects of three common POS tagging tools (i.e., spaCy, NLTK, and Flair) on handling fairly simple intra- and inter-sentence transformation regarding adverbial clause and sentence appending. This demonstrates the great potential of our method to deliver a systematic test and reveal the unaware issues, which may benefit the validation, repair, and improvement, for POS tagging tools.