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Note: I have added a (***) to blogs which have been viewed 1000+ times

Building NLG Systems

• Accuracy Errors Go Beyond Getting Facts Wrong
• AI professionals also focus on change management
• Amateurs focus on models; professionals focus on data
• Bad Data Means Bad Output
• Boring uses of language models
• Can ChatGPT do Data-to-Text? (***) 
• Care Needed in Analytics and Data Science!
• Challenges are Same for Neural and Rule NLG
• Challenges of Surface Realisation
• Check Out a New Dataset Before Using It
• Dealing with Edge Cases in NLG
• Difficult Words for Neural NLG Systems
• Does Deep Learning Prefer Readability over Accuracy? 
• Does Quality Matter in Training Data?
• Election results: Lessons from a real-world NLG system
• Embedding Machine Learning in a Rules-Based NLG System (***)
• Generated Texts Must Be Accurate! (***)
• Hallucination in Neural NLG (***)
• How do I Build an NLG System: Requirements and Corpora (***)
• How do I Build an NLG System: Testing and Quality Assurance
• How do I Build an NLG System: Tools?  (***)
• How Should Different NLG Components Add Value?
• INLG: What real-world NLG users want
• Is building neural NLG faster than rules NLG? No one knows, but I suspect not. 
• Is GPT3 Useful for NLG? (***)
• Language is diverse!
• Learning does not require evaluation metrics
• Lexical Choice Needs Machine Learning!
• LLMs and Data-to-text
• ML is Used More if it Does Not Limit Control
• Natural Language Generation and Machine Learning (***)
• NLG Systems Must be Customisable
• NLG vs Templates: Levels of Sophistication in Generating Text (***)
• NLG=Task+Data+Model/Alg+Eval
• Pain Points in Health NLG: Data, Evaluation, Safety
• Pragmatic correctness is a challenge for NLG
• Problems in using LLMs in commercial products (***)
• Real-World Neural NLG
• Should I Use Deep Learning?
• Simple vs Complex Models
• Sports NLG: Commercial vs Academic Perspective
• Skills Required to Use Different NLG Technologies
• Summarisation datasets should contain summaries!
• Testing Multiple Hypotheses 
• Texts should be adapted to users
• The story of simplenlg (***)
• Use Good Engineering Methodology When Building NLG Systems!
• Varying Words In NLG Texts
• We Need Robust Ways to Select Content of NLG Texts
• We need to understand what users want!
• What are the Problems with Rule-Based NLG?
• What Makes a Good Narrative?
• You Need to Understand your Corpora! The Weathergov Example (***)

Evaluating NLG Systems

• A bad way to measure hallucination
• A Consumer Perspective on Evaluation
• Accuracy, Fluency, and Utility
• Are Experts Needed in Human Evaluation?
• BLEU-Human Correlation is Increasing: What does this Mean?
• BLEU in Different Languages: Dont use it for German 
• Evaluating Accuracy
• Evaluating chatGPT (***)
• Evaluating factual accuracy in complex data-to-text
• Evaluation: Plan ahead, details matter, keep it simple, pilot, be careful
• Evaluation Grand Challenge: Is NLP System Good Enough for a Use Case?
• Evaluation in Medicine and NLG/NLP
• Exercise: Find Problems in an Evaluation
• Future of NLG evaluation: LLMs and high quality human eval?
• How to do an NLG Evaluation: Metrics (***)
• How to do an NLG Evaluation: Human Ratings in Artificial Context (***)
• How to do an NLG Evaluation: Human Ratings in Real-World Context
• How to do an NLG Evaluation: Task-Based (Extrinsic) Performance in Real-World Context
• How to Validate Metrics (***)
• How Would I Automatically Evaluate NLG Systems?
• Humans make mistakes too
• I’m very worried about data contamination
• Is BLEU valid? First observations and concerns
• Keep Good Records of Your Experiments
• Lets use error annotations to evaluate systems!
• Mistakes in Evaluating ML
• MSc Course on Evaluating AI
• My Guidelines for Evaluating AI Systems
• My MSc students evaluate chatGPT
• Objective evaluation of NLG texts
• Please Use Two-Tailed P Values!
• Real-world utility is based on many things
• Research Ethics of A/B Testing
• Regression to Mean
• Shared Task on Evaluating Accuracy?
• Small differences in BLEU are meaningless
• Study Design for Systematic Review of BLEU Validity: Comments Welcome!
• Ten tips on doing a good evaluation
• Texts can be accurate but still not appropriate
• There are many types of human evaluation!
• Types of NLG Evaluation: Which is Right for Me? (***)
• Use Proper Baselines!
• We need more extrinsic (task) evaluation!
• We should evaluate real-world impact!
• Why do we still use 18-year old BLEU? (***)
• Why doesnt BLEU work for NLG?
• Why is ROUGE so popular?

Academic Life

• Academic NLG should not fixate on end-to-end neural
• Academic Researchers Should be Scouts and Explorers
• Academic Teaching vs Commercial Training Courses
• ACL vs TACL Reviewing
• Apologies to my students for limited feedback!
• Best Papers I Read in 2020
• Can I present my paper twice?
• Challenging NLG datasets and tasks
• Commercial and Academic Perspectives on NLG (and AI?)
• Common Flaws in NLP Evaluation Experiments
• Could there be fraud in NLP Research?
• Does chatGPT make leaderboards less meaningful?
• Doing Less
• Good Papers are Hard to Publish
• Engineering Perspective: Understand Issues, Find Simple Solution
• How can I tell if a paper is scientifically solid?
• How I Review Papers
• I dont like leaderboards
• I enjoy reviewing for TACL
• I’m Impressed by Capetown Uni’s Diversity 
• Limits of pre-publication reviewing
• Managing Research Projects is Painful but Necessary
• More discussion, fewer papers at conferences?
• My PhD Students: Where Are They Now (June 2017) (***) 
• NLP has become much more interesting!
• Our 2022 Publications: NLG Evaluation, Requirements, Resources
• Peer Review Has Improved My Papers
• Please check the boring details in your paper!
• Publication Requirements for PhD Students
• Publish in Journals!
• Real-World Impact of Academic Research
• Reviewing has changed over the years; conferences need to change as well
• What are Benefits of Physical Conferences?
• What Should Academic NLP Researchers Focus on? (***)
• Why I do not Want to be a Co-author on Your Paper (***)
• “Will I Pass my PhD Viva” (***)

Other Topics

• Adding Narrative to a Covid Dashboard
• Bayesian vs Neural Networks (***)
• Can LLMs make medicine safer?
• ChatGPT error or human error?
• chatGPT in Health: Exciting if we ignore the hype
• chatGPT: Great science, unclear commercials, hate the hype (***)
• Come Join Us in Aberdeen!
• Conversational data-to-text
• Could NLG systems injure or even kill people?
• Do people “cheat” by overfitting test data (***)
• Do We Encourage Researchers to Use Inappropriate Data Sets? (***)
• Exciting NLG Research Topics (June 2017)
• Farewell to Richard Kittredge, pioneer in applied NLG
• Get You Hands Dirty!
• Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me (***)
• Has Neural NLG Become More Scientific?
• How accurate do chatGPT texts need to be?
• How do I Learn about NLG? (***)
• How do Users React to NLG?
• Human editing of NLG texts
• In 2019 LM output was fluent but not trustworthy: still true in 2024
• Language Grounding and Context (***)
• Lessons from 25 Years of Information Extraction
• Lets Use ML for Insights! (***)
• LLM hype brings memories of IBM Watson
• Lots about evaluation and methodology at INLG – Great!
• Many Papers on Machine Learning in NLP are Scientifically Dubious
• My Vision for SIGGEN
• New book on NLG?
• New project PhilHumans: Better interaction in personal health apps 
• NLG and Explainable AI (***) 
• NLG texts should not upset people
• Non-Experts Struggle with Information Graphics
• Notes from a Dev Conf: Sensible Attitude to Trendy AI Tech, Arria Presentations 
• PhD on using AI/NLG to help cancer patients at home
• Product Descriptions
• Project and Research Fellow Position in Reproducibility of Human Evaluations
• Real-world usage of LLMs in Journalism
• Summarising Messy Data
• Tableau buys Narrative Science
• Text or Graphics?
• Response to Goldberg’s Blog on Deep Learning for NLG (***)
• Vision: NLG Can Help Humanise Data and AI
• We can learn from the past in AI/Medicine
• What LLMs cannot do (***)
• Where is NLG Most Successful Commercially? (***) 
• Why isnt Research Software such as BabyTalk Used?
• Why isnt there More Open-Source NLG Software? (***)
• Working in Universities vs Companies (***)
• Writing NLG Pages for Wikipedia

Personal

• Climate change makes me angry
• Cycling through Northern England
• Cycling through Southwest England
• Cycling Through Wales, England, and my Wife’s Family History
• Goodbye to a Synagogue
• Life is “Flat” under Lockdown
• My Father Takes Me to Mexico
• My Son Visits Home
• The Brexit Mess 

Arria blogs written by me (these are intended for non-specialists)

• Chatbots are a great way to present insights!
• Choosing words to clearly describe data
• Corpus Analysis: A great way to understand what your NLG system needs to do
• Finding creative solutions to detect mistakes in neural-NLG narratives
• Humans post-editing NLG-generated narratives
• NLG drives consistent narratives
• NLG is different from other language technologies
• OpenAI GPT System: What does it do?
• The Grand Challenge for NLG: Making Data Accessible to Humans
• The power of words
• This 22-year-old book on NLG is still relevant
• Why neural language models don’t work well in NLG

Other blogs

• “Lying” in computer-generated texts: hallucinations and omissions (OUP)