User-centered & Robust NLP OSS: Lessons Learned from Developing & Maintaining RSMTool

For the last 5 years, we have developed and maintained RSMTool – an open-source tool for evaluating NLP systems that automatically score written and spoken responses. RSMTool is designed to be cross-disciplinary, borrowing heavily from NLP, machine learning, and educational measurement. Its cross-disciplinary nature has required us to learn a user-centered development approach in terms of both design and implementation. We share some of these lessons in this paper.