Langyuan Cui
Author directory2026
Communicating Chess Strategies in Natural Language
Langyuan Cui | Chun Kai Ling | Hwee Tou Ng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Langyuan Cui | Chun Kai Ling | Hwee Tou Ng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Chess engines have long achieved superhuman playing strength. However, the underlying strategy behind their move suggestions is difficult for human players, even skilled ones, to comprehend. Motivated by this, we propose the task of chess *strategy verbalization*, which is to describe chess strategies in natural language. We design (i) a pipeline for verbalizing strategies and (ii) an evaluation framework for objective evaluation of generated strategy descriptions. Our experiments show that natural language is a promising and interpretable medium for communicating strategic information to both human and LLM players. We glean additional interesting insights, including (a) the importance of evaluating strategies beyond the main line, (b) the limitations of pure concept-based descriptions, and (c) the limitations of relying on LLMs rather than humans for evaluation.