The Second Multilingual Surface Realisation Shared Task (SR’19): Overview and Evaluation Results

We report results from the SR’19 Shared Task, the second edition of a multilingual surface realisation task organised as part of the EMNLP’19 Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation. As in SR’18, the shared task comprised two different tracks: (a) a Shallow Track where the inputs were full UD structures with word order information removed and tokens lemmatised; and (b) a Deep Track where additionally, functional words and morphological information were removed. The Shallow Track was offered in 11, and the Deep Track in three languages. Systems were evaluated (a) automatically, using a range of intrinsic metrics, and (b) by human judges in terms of readability and meaning similarity to a reference. This report presents the evaluation results, along with descriptions of the SR’19 tracks, data and evaluation methods, as well as brief summaries of the participating systems. For full descriptions of the participating systems, please see the separate system reports elsewhere in this volume.