In order to increase trust in the usage of Bayesian Networks and to cement their role as a model which can aid in critical decision making, the challenge of explainability must be faced. Previous attempts at explaining Bayesian Networks have largely focused on graphical or visual aids. In this paper we aim to highlight the importance of a natural language approach to explanation and to discuss some of the previous and state of the art attempts of the textual explanation of Bayesian Networks. We outline several challenges that remain to be addressed in the generation and validation of natural language explanations of Bayesian Networks. This can serve as a reference for future work on natural language explanations of Bayesian Networks.

The evaluation of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems has recently aroused much interest in the research community, since it should address several challenging aspects, such as readability of the generated texts, adequacy to the user within a particular context and moment and linguistic quality-related issues (e.g., correctness, coherence, understandability), among others. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for evaluating NLG systems that is inspired on the triangular test used in the field of sensory analysis. This technique allows us to compare two texts generated by different subjects and to i) determine whether statistically significant differences are detected between them when evaluated by humans and ii) quantify to what extent the number of evaluators plays an important role in the sensitivity of the results. As a proof of concept, we apply this evaluation technique in a real use case in the field of meteorology, showing the advantages and disadvantages of our proposal.

In this paper, we describe SimpleNLG-GL, an adaptation of the linguistic realisation SimpleNLG library for the Galician language. This implementation is derived from SimpleNLG-ES, the English-Spanish version of this library. It has been tested using a battery of examples which covers the most common rules for Galician.

We describe SimpleNLG-ES, an adaptation of the SimpleNLG realization library for the Spanish language. Our implementation is based on the bilingual English-French SimpleNLG-EnFr adaptation. The library has been tested using a battery of examples that ensure that the most common syntax, morphology and orthography rules for Spanish are met. The library is currently being used in three different projects for the development of data-to-text systems in the meteorological, statistical data information, and business intelligence application domains.