  The TSNLP project has investigated various aspects of the construction,
maintenance and application of systematic test suites as diagnostic and
evaluation tools for NLP applications. The paper summarizes the motivation and
main results of the project: besides the solid methodological foundation, TSNLP
has produced substantial multi-purpose and multi-user test suites for three
European languages together with a set of specialized tools that facilitate the
construction, extension, maintenance, retrieval, and customization of the test
data. As TSNLP results, including the data and technology, are made publicly
available, the project presents a valuable linguistic resourc e that has the
potential of providing a wide-spread pre-standard diagnostic and evaluation
tool for both developers and users of NLP applications.
