Evaluating NLG systems: A brief introduction

Summary This year the International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG) will feature an award for the paper with the best evaluation. The purpose of this award is to provide an incentive for NLG researchers to pay more attention to the way they assess the output of their systems. This essay provides a short introduction to evaluation in NLG, explaining key terms and distinctions. How can I evaluate my system? It is hard to say in general how you should evaluate your NLG system.