About

I am a Natural Language Generation Expert and Lead Data Scientist working for trivago in Düsseldorf, Germany . I lead a team of data scientists to solve challenges with trivago’s core content types, whilst actively participating in research. Online, I can be found on Bluesky.

Since January, 2025 I have been elected to serve on the board for the ACL Special Interest Group for Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN). I also try and help to maintain the open source SimpleNLG realiser project on GitHub.

Here is an up-to-date copy of my curriculum vitae. I also have a LinkedIn profile as well.

Publications

• Eduardo Calò, Lydia Penkert, Saad Mahamood (2025). Lessons from a User Experience Evaluation of NLP Interfaces. To appear in the findings of the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas (NAACL 2025). Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA . April, 2025.
• Patrícia Schmidtová, Saad Mahamood, Simone Balloccu, Ondrej Dusek, Albert Gatt, Dimitra Gkatzia, David M. Howcroft, Ondrej Platek, Adarsa Sivaprasad (2024). Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A survey of Current Evaluation Practices. Proceedings of the 17^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2024). Tokyo, Japan . September, 2024 — (PDF) [Awarded Best Evaluation Paper]
• Srinivas Ramesh Kamath, Fahime Same, Saad Mahamood (2024). Generating Hotel Highlights from Unstructured Text using LLMs. Proceedings of the 17^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2024). Tokyo, Japan . September, 2024 — (PDF)
• Marcel Nawrath, Agnieszka Nowak, Tristan Ratz, Danilo Walenta, Juri Opitz, Leonardo Ribeiro, João Sedoc, Daniel Deutsch, Simon Mille, Yixin Liu, Sebastian Gehrmann, Lining Zhang, Saad Mahamood, Miruna Clinciu, Khyathi Chandu, Yufang Hou (2024). On the Role of Summary Content Units in Text Summarization Evaluation. Published at the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2024). Mexico City, Mexico . June, 2024 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood (2024). ReproHum #0124-03: Reproducing Human Evaluations of end-to-end approaches for Referring Expression Generation. Published at the 4^th workshop on Human Evaluations of NLP Systems (HumEval '24) at LREC-COLING 2024. Turin, Italy . May, 2024 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood (2023). Reproduction of Human Evaluations in: “It’s not Rocket Science: Interpreting Figurative Language in Narratives”. Published at the 3^rd workshop on Human Evaluations of NLP Systems (HumEval '23). Varna, Bulgaria . September, 2023 — (PDF)
• Lining Zhang, João Sedoc, Simon Mille, Yufang Hou, Sebastian Gehrmann, Daniel Deutsch, Elizabeth Clark, Yixin Liu, Miruna Clinciu, Saad Mahamood, Khyathi Chandu (2023). Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of Finding Qualified Workers on MTurk for Summarization. Proceedings of the 61^st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023). Toronto, Canada . July, 2023.
• Kaustubh Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, Aadesh Gupta, Zhenhao Li, Saad Mahamood, Abinaya Mahadiran, Simon Mille, Ashish Shrivastava, Samson Tan, Tongshang Wu, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Jinho D. Choi, Eduard Hovy, Ondřej Dušek, Sebastian Ruder, et al. (2023). NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation. Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT). Vol. 9 No. 1. Published 8^th April, 2023 — (Article)
• Emiel van Miltenburg, Miruna Clinciu, Ondřej Dušek, Dimitra Gkatzia, Stephanie Inglis, Leo Leppänen, Saad Mahamood, Stephanie Schoch, Craig Thomson, Luou Wen (2023). Barriers and enabling factors for error analysis in NLG research. Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT). Vol. 9 No. 1. Published 21^st February, 2023 — (Article)
• Simon Mille, Kaustubh D. Dhole, Saad Mahamood, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Varun Gangal, Mihir Kale, Emiel van Miltenburg and Sebastian Gehrmann (2021). Automatic Construction of Evaluation Suites for Natural Language Generation Datasets. Proceedings of the thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021). December 2021 — (PDF)
• Emiel van Miltenberg, Miruna Clinciu, Ondřej Dušek, Dimitra Gkatzia, Stephanie Inglis, Leo Leppänen, Saad Mahamood, Emma Manning, Stephanie Schoch, Craig Thompson and Luou Wen (2021). Underreporting of errors in NLG output, and what to do about it. Proceedings of the 14^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2021). Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom . September 2021 — (PDF) [Commendation for Outstanding Position Paper]
• Saad Mahamood (2021). Reproducing a Comparison of Hedged and Non-hedged NLG Texts. Proceedings of the 14^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2021). Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom . September 2021 — (PDF)
• Sebastian Gehrmann, Tosin Adewumi, Karmanya Aggarwal, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Antoine Bosselut, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Miruna Clinciu, Dipanjan Das, Kaustubh D. Dhole, Wanyu Du, Esin Durmus, Ondrej Dušek, Chris Emezue, Varun Gangal, Cristina Garbacea, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Yufang Hou, Yacine Jernite, Harsh Jhamtani, Yangfeng Ji, Shailza Jolly, Dhruv Kumar, Faisal Ladhak, Aman Madaan, Mounica Maddela, Khyati Mahajan, Saad Mahamood, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Pedro Henrique Martins, Angelina McMillan-Major, Simon Mille, Emiel van Miltenburg, Moin Nadeem, Shashi Narayan, Vitaly Nikolaev, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Salomey Osei, Ankur Parikh, Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Niranjan Ramesh Rao, Vikas Raunak, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Sashank Santhanam, João Sedoc, Thibault Sellam, Samira Shaikh, Anastasia Shimorina, Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo, Hendrik Strobelt, Nishant Subramani, Wei Xu, Diyi Yang, Akhila Yerukola, Jiawei Zhou (2021). The 💎 GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics (GEM 2021). Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics August 2021 — (PDF)
• Miruna Clinciu, Dimitra Gkatzia, and Saad Mahamood (2021). It’s Commonsense, isn’t it? Demystifying Human Evaluations in Commonsense-Enhanced NLG Systems. Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP systems (HumEval) at the 16^th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Kyiv, Ukraine . April 2021 — (PDF)
• David M. Howcroft, Anya Belz, Miruna-Adriana Clinciu, Dimitra Gkatzia, Sadid A. Hasan, Saad Mahamood, Simon Mille, Emiel van Miltenburg, Sashank Santhanam, Verena Rieser (2020). Twenty Years of Confusion in Human Evaluation: NLG Needs Evaluation Sheets and Standardised Definitions. Proceedings of the 13^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2020). Dublin, Ireland . December 2020 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood and Maciej Zembrzuski (2019). Hotel Scribe: Generating High Variation Hotel Descriptions. Proceedings of the 12^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2019). Tokyo, Japan . October 2019 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood (2019). Explainable Artificial Intelligence and its potential within Industry. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Interactive Natural Language Technology for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (NL4XAI 2019). Tokyo, Japan . October 2019 — (PDF)
• Dimitra Gkatzia and Saad Mahamood (2015). A Snapshot of NLG Evaluation Practices 2005 - 2014. Proceedings of the 15^th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2015). Brighton, United Kingdom . September 2015 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood, William Bradshaw, and Ehud Reiter (2014). Generating Annotated Graphs using the NLG Pipeline Architecture. Proceedings of the 8^th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2014). Philadelphia, PA, USA . June 2014 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood and Ehud Reiter (2012). Working with Clinicians to Improve a Patient-Information NLG system. Proceedings of the 7th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2012). Starved Rock, Utica, IL, USA . May 2012 Pages 100-104. ISBN 978-1-937284-23-7 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood and Ehud Reiter (2011). Generating Affective Natural Language for Parents of Neonatal Infants. Proceedings of the 13^th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2011). Nancy, France . September, 2011 — (PDF)
• Wendy Moncur, Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Yvonne Freer (2009). Involving healthcare consumers in knowledge acquisition for virtual healthcare. Virtual Healthcare Interaction 2009 (AAAI Fall Symposium Series). Arlington, Virgina, USA . November, 2009 — (PDF)
• Albert Gatt, François Portet, Ehud Reiter, Jim Hunter, Saad Mahamood, Wendy Moncur, Somayajulu Sripada (2009). From Data to Text in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Using NLG Technology for Decision Support and Information Management. AI Communications, IOS Press.
• Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Chris Mellish (2008). Neonatal Intensive Care Information for Parents — An Affective Approach. Proceedings of the Twenty-First IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2008). Jyväskylä, Finland . June, 2008. Editors: Seppo Puuronen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Alexey Tsymbal, and Dah-Jye Lee. ISSN: 1063-7125 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Chris Mellish (2007). A Comparison of Hedged and Non-hedged NLG Texts. Proceedings of the 11^th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2007). Schloss Dagstul, Germany . June 2007. Editor: Stephan Busemann. ISSN: 0946-0098 — (PDF)

Patents

• Method and apparatus for document planning — Saad Mahamood (2014), US20160232152A1

Qualifications

• PhD in Computing Science — University of Aberdeen (2010).
  Thesis Title: “Generating Affective Natural Language for Parents of Neonatal Infants”.
  Supervisors: Prof. Ehud Reiter and Prof. Chris Mellish.
• MSc in Intelligent Systems — University of Sussex (2006).
  Thesis Title: “Automatically extracting spatially-referenced information from the web”.
• BSc in Computing Science — Aberystwyth University (2005).

Contact

Dr. Saad Mahamood

Address: trivago N.V., Kesselstraße 5-7, 40221 Düsseldorf, Germany .

Email:

Bluesky: @saad.me.uk

Mastodon: @Saad