Incremental Natural Language Processing: Challenges, Strategies, and Evaluation
It addresses the problem of incremental NLP for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as a survey that synthesizes existing work.
This survey consolidates and categorizes approaches to incremental natural language processing, highlighting challenges and trade-offs, with a focus on evaluation issues where standard metrics often fail to capture incremental properties.
Incrementality is ubiquitous in human-human interaction and beneficial for human-computer interaction. It has been a topic of research in different parts of the NLP community, mostly with focus on the specific topic at hand even though incremental systems have to deal with similar challenges regardless of domain. In this survey, I consolidate and categorize the approaches, identifying similarities and differences in the computation and data, and show trade-offs that have to be considered. A focus lies on evaluating incremental systems because the standard metrics often fail to capture the incremental properties of a system and coming up with a suitable evaluation scheme is non-trivial.