Imaginary Numbers! Evaluating Numerical Referring Expressions by Neural End-to-End Surface Realization Systems

Rossana Cunha, Osuji Chinonso, João Campos, Brian Timoney, Brian Davis, Fabio Cozman, Adriana Pagano, Thiago Castro Ferreira


Abstract
Neural end-to-end surface realizers output more fluent texts than classical architectures. However, they tend to suffer from adequacy problems, in particular hallucinations in numerical referring expression generation. This poses a problem to language generation in sensitive domains, as is the case of robot journalism covering COVID-19 and Amazon deforestation. We propose an approach whereby numerical referring expressions are converted from digits to plain word form descriptions prior to being fed to state-of-the-art Large Language Models. We conduct automatic and human evaluations to report the best strategy to numerical superficial realization. Code and data are publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2024.insights-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Shabnam Tafreshi, Arjun Akula, João Sedoc, Aleksandr Drozd, Anna Rogers, Anna Rumshisky
Venues:
insights | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–81
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.insights-1.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.insights-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rossana Cunha, Osuji Chinonso, João Campos, Brian Timoney, Brian Davis, Fabio Cozman, Adriana Pagano, and Thiago Castro Ferreira. 2024. Imaginary Numbers! Evaluating Numerical Referring Expressions by Neural End-to-End Surface Realization Systems. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, pages 73–81, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Imaginary Numbers! Evaluating Numerical Referring Expressions by Neural End-to-End Surface Realization Systems (Cunha et al., insights-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.insights-1.10.pdf