Working in Universities vs Companies
A few observations (not recommendations!) about what it is like to work as a researcher in university and corporate contexts.
Comparing Human Evaluations
I was impressed by a recent paper by Läubli et al which experimentally compared the results of different human evaluations in MT (eg, how do results differ between expert and non-expert human raters), in the context of understanding when MT systems are “better” than human translators. Would be great to see more experimental comparisons of different human evaluations in NLG!
Best Papers I Read in 2020
Seven papers which I blogged or tweeted about in 2020, covering evaluation, safety, engineering and system building, and long-term perspective on NLP. I recommend these to all; they made an impact on me, perhaps they will make an impact on you as well!
Real-World Neural NLG
I was very impressed by a recent paper from a team at Facebook about a production-ready end-to-end neural NLG system. Especially interesting to me was the “engineering” approach to key issues such as accuracy, data collection, and latency.
Academic NLG should not fixate on end-to-end neural
I was shocked when a PhD student recently told me that he thought he had to focus on end-to-end neural approaches, because this dominates the conferences he wants to publish in. I’m all for research in end-to-end neural, but fixating on this to the exclusion of everything else is a mistake. Especially since end-to-end neural approaches do not currently work very well.
Evaluating Accuracy
Craig Thomson and I will present a paper at INLG on a methodology for evaluating the accuracy of generated texts, based on asking human annotators to mark up factual errors in a text. This is not cheap, but I think it is the most robust and reliable approach to measuring accuracy.
Get Your Hands Dirty!
I would like to see more PhD students and postdocs “getting their hands dirty” by collecting real-world data, working with real-world users and experts, and conducting real-world evaluations with users. Its not easy, but engaging with the real world does help scientific and technological progress.
Could NLG systems injure or even kill people?
I recently attended a workshop on Safety for Conversational AI, which discussed how such systems could potentially harm people. Is it possible that NLG systems could harm their users, maybe even contributing to death in the worst case?
My Son Visits Home
This is a personal blog. My son visited home after spending 6 months in a residential special-needs school because of lockdown. It was wonderful to see him again, and I took a few photos of his time at home.
Please check the boring details in your paper!
Over the past few weeks, on several occasions I’ve struggled to understand papers because authors made mistakes in references, tables, figures,or formulas. I know that its boring for authors to check such things, but it makes life much easier for your readers!
