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!
Why isnt Research Software such as BabyTalk Used?
Most research software does not enter everyday operational use. In part because research projects usually do not worry about issues such as maintainability, regulatory approval, and change management, which are essential to the long-term success of commercial software.
What Makes a Good Narrative?
Some thoughts on the properties texts need to have in order to be good non-fictional narratives, and speculations on how we might generate such texts.
Cycling Through Wales, England, and my Wife’s Family History
A travelogue about my recent cycling holiday, in Wales and England, where I saw many places related to my wife’s family history,
Mistakes in Evaluating ML
Unfortunately, I see many students (and indeed other people) make some basic mistakes when evaluating machine learning, for classifiers as well as NLG.
Grand Challenge: Helping the General Public to Make Data-Based Decisions
15 years ago, I siad a grand challenge for CS/AI./NLG was to help the general public effectively understand and use data. Progress on this has been less than I hoped, but this remains a worthwhile and important challenge!
Farewell to Richard Kittredge, pioneer in applied NLG
Farewell to Richard Kittredge, who died in early April 2019. Richard was a pioneer in applied NLG, and also an inspiration to me personally.
Ehud Reiter's Blog 