Come Join Us in Aberdeen!
There are lots of opportunites in Aberdeen for people interested in NLG, including faculty positions and PhD studentships at the university, and commercial software development jobs at Arria. Come join me and my colleagues!
Lots about evaluation and methodology at INLG – Great!
I’m just back from INLG 2019 in Tokyo, where I was very happy to see an increased emphasis on evaluation (and other methodological issues), including several papers on improving human evaluations.
Care Needed in Analytics and Data Science!
It can be very exciting to apply powerful analytics and ML techniques to analyse data sets, but we need to be careful, otherwise we will make mistakes.
Accuracy, Fluency, and Utility
Texts produced by NLG systems can be evaluated in terms of accuracy (content is correct), fluency (text is readable), and utility (text is useful). I discuss these three “dimensions” of NLG evaluation.
Generated Texts Must Be Accurate!
I’ve been shocked by the fact that many neural NLG researchers dont seem to care that their systems produce texts which contain many factual mistakes and hallucinations. NLG users expect accurate texts, and will not use systems which produce inaccurate texts, not matter how well the texts are written,
The Brexit Mess
I am getting so fed up with UK politics that I will break my “no politics” rule in this blog and express my frustration with the Brexit mess and the way politicians have handled it.
I’m Impressed by Capetown Uni’s Diversity
I’m impressed by the diversity of NLG researchers at Capetown, from a gender, race, and disability perspective. An inspiration the rest of us!
ML is Used More if it Does Not Limit Control
When we try to use ML in commercial NLG contexts, one of the challenges is that NLG developers want to be able to customise, configure, and control their systems. So we need ML approaches which do not stop devs from configuring things they are likely to want to change.
Do We Encourage Researchers to Use Inappropriate Data Sets?
I’m beginning to think that in some ways the NLP community *encourages* researchers to use poor-quality or otherwise inappropriate data sets. Which is a truly depressing thought…
NLG and Explainable AI
Some thoughts on key NLG challenges in explainable AI: evaluation, conceptual alignment, narrative. Comments are welcome!
Ehud Reiter's Blog 