The Design of Eman, an Experiment Manager

We present eman, a tool for managing large numbers of computational experiments. Over the years of our research in machine translation (MT), we have collected a couple of ideas for efficient experimenting. We believe these ideas are generally applicable in (computational) research of any field. We incorporated them into eman in order to make them available in a command-line Unix environment. The aim of this article is to highlight the core of the many ideas. We hope the text can serve as a collection of experiment management tips and tricks for anyone, regardless their field of study or computer platform theyuse. The specific examplesweprovide in eman’s current syntax are less important but they allow us to use concrete terms. The article thus also fills the gap in eman documentation by providing some high-level overview.