# Incremental Natural Language Processing: Challenges, Strategies, and Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SHANKS: Simultaneous Hearing and Thinking for Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06917/) (2025)
- [TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10845/) (2023)
- [Efficient Encoders for Streaming Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09244/) (2023)
- [The Road to Quality is Paved with Good Revisions: A Detailed Evaluation Methodology for Revision Policies in Incremental Sequence Labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15508/) (2023)
- [Prior Lessons of Incremental Dialogue and Robot Action Management for the Age of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00953/) (2025)
- [From Partial to Strictly Incremental Constituent Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02782/) (2024)
- [When Only Time Will Tell: Interpreting How Transformers Process Local Ambiguities Through the Lens of Restart-Incrementality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13113/) (2024)
- [Revising with a Backward Glance: Regressions and Skips during Reading as Cognitive Signals for Revision Policies in Incremental Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18229/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.