Natural Language Generation enhances human decision-making with uncertain information
This addresses the challenge of improving decision-making under uncertainty for general users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing presentation methods.
The study tackled the problem of how to present uncertain data to enhance human decision-making, showing that Natural Language Generation (NLG) improves decision-making by 24% on average compared to graphical methods, with a 44% improvement when combined with graphics.
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).