System Building Cost vs. Output Quality in Data-to-Text Generation

Data-to-text generation systems tend to be knowledge-based and manually built, which limits their reusability and makes them time and cost-intensive to create and maintain. Methods for automating (part of) the system building process exist, but do such methods risk a loss in output quality? In this paper, we investigate the cost/quality trade-off in generation system building. We compare four new data-to-text systems which were created by predominantly automatic techniques against six existing systems for the same domain which were created by predominantly manual techniques. We evaluate the ten systems using intrinsic automatic metrics and human quality ratings. We find that increasing the degree to which system building is automated does not necessarily result in a reduction in output quality. We find furthermore that standard automatic evaluation metrics underestimate the quality of handcrafted systems and over-estimate the quality of automatically created systems.