Natural Language Generation enhances human decision-making with uncertain information.

Gkatzia, Dimitra; Lemon, Oliver; Rieser, Verena

Abstract

Decision-making is often dependent on uncertain data, e.g. data associated with confidence scores or probabilities. We present a comparison of different information presentations for uncertain data and, for the first time, measure their effects on human decision-making. We show that the use of Natural Language Generation (NLG) improves decision-making under uncertainty, compared to state-of-the-art graphical-based representation methods. In a task-based study with 442 adults, we found that presentations using NLG lead to 24% better decision-making on average than the graphical presentations, and to 44% better decision-making when NLG is combined with graphics. We also show that women achieve significantly better results when presented with NLG output (an 87% increase on average compared to graphical presentations).

Citation

Gkatzia, D., Lemon, O., & Rieser, V. (2016). Natural Language Generation enhances human decision-making with uncertain information. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (264-268). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P16-2043

• Conference Name: 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Volume 2 (short papers)
• Start Date: Aug 7, 2016
• End Date: Aug 12, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Apr 15, 2016
• Publication Date: Aug 7, 2016
• Deposit Date: May 25, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 7, 2016
• Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 264-268
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• ISBN: 978-1-945626-01-2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P16-2043
• Keywords: Uncertain data; Natural Language Generation; decision-making
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/10278