Underreporting of errors in NLG output, and what to do about it

Emiel van Miltenburg, Miruna Clinciu, Ondřej Dušek, Dimitra Gkatzia, Stephanie Inglis, Leo Leppänen, Saad Mahamood, Emma Manning, Stephanie Schoch, Craig Thomson, Luou Wen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

Abstract

We observe a severe under-reporting of the different kinds of errors that Natural Language Generation systems make. This is a problem, because mistakes are an important indicator of where systems should still be improved. If authors only report overall performance metrics, the research community is left in the dark about the specific weaknesses that are exhibited by `state-of-the-art' research. Next to quantifying the extent of error under-reporting, this position paper provides recommendations for error identification, analysis and reporting.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Place of PublicationAberdeen, Scotland, UK
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages140-153
Number of pages14
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2021
EventThe 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation - Aberdeen (online), Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Duration: 20 Sep 202124 Sep 2021
Conference number: 14

Conference

ConferenceThe 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Abbreviated titleINLG
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityAberdeen
Period20/09/2124/09/21

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