This paper reports results from a reproduction study in which we repeated the human evaluation of the PASS Dutch-language football report generation system (van der Lee et al., 2017). The work was carried out as part of the ReproGen Shared Task on Re
producibility of Human Evaluations in NLG, in Track A (Paper 1). We aimed to repeat the original study exactly, with the main difference that a different set of evaluators was used. We describe the study design, present the results from the original and the reproduction study, and then compare and analyse the differences between the two sets of results. For the two headline' results of average Fluency and Clarity, we find that in both studies, the system was rated more highly for Clarity than for Fluency, and Clarity had higher standard deviation. Clarity and Fluency ratings were higher, and their standard deviations lower, in the reproduction study than in the original study by substantial margins. Clarity had a higher degree of reproducibility than Fluency, as measured by the coefficient of variation. Data and code are publicly available.
This paper describes our contribution to the Shared Task ReproGen by Belz et al. (2021), which investigates the reproducibility of human evaluations in the context of Natural Language Generation. We selected the paper Generation of Company descriptio
ns using concept-to-text and text-to-text deep models: data set collection and systems evaluation'' (Qader et al., 2018) and aimed to replicate, as closely to the original as possible, the human evaluation and the subsequent comparison between the human judgements and the automatic evaluation metrics. Here, we first outline the text generation task of the paper of Qader et al. (2018). Then, we document how we approached our replication of the paper's human evaluation. We also discuss the difficulties we encountered and which information was missing. Our replication has medium to strong correlation (0.66 Spearman overall) with the original results of Qader et al. (2018), but due to the missing information about how Qader et al. (2018) compared the human judgements with the metric scores, we have refrained from reproducing this comparison.
