The importance of narrative and other lessons from an evaluation of an NLG system that summarises clinical data

Ehud Reiter (1) , Albert Gatt (1) , François Portet (1) , Marian van Der Meulen (2)

1 CSD - Department of Computing Science - University of Aberdeen
2 Department of Psychology

The BABY TALK BT -45 system generates tex- tual summaries of clinical data about babies in a neonatal intensive care unit. A recent task-based evaluation of the system suggested that these summaries are useful, but not as effective as they could be. In this paper we present a qualitative analysis of problems that the evaluation highlighted in BT-45 texts. Many of these problems are due to the fact that BT-45 does not generate good narrative texts; this is a topic which has not previously received much attention from the NLG research community, but seems to be quite important for creating good data-to-text systems.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Ehud Reiter, Albert Gatt, François Portet, Marian van Der Meulen. The importance of narrative and other lessons from an evaluation of an NLG system that summarises clinical data. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-08), Jun 2008, Salt Fork, Ohio, United States. pp.147--153. ⟨hal-00998615⟩