completionsometimes

Completionsometimes is a term used in discussions of interactive natural language generation to describe a mode in which a system emits a text completion only under certain conditions, rather than providing unsolicited completions. The concept highlights an intermittent generation behavior, contrasting with always-on auto-completion or fully manual text entry.

Origin and usage of the term are informal. It does not correspond to a standardized feature name in major NLP platforms. Instead, completionsometimes appears in technical blogs, workshop notes, and design discussions as a way to describe conditional or gated generation in user-facing systems.

Implementation and variants. Completionsometimes can be realized by gating mechanisms that decide to produce a completion with a given probability or based on contextual cues, user actions, or explicit requests. It may be stateful—where a prior action or user preference sets a generation policy—or rule-based, triggering completions only after certain triggers are detected. In practice, it is often paired with privacy and resource considerations, aiming to reduce exposure to model outputs and conserve compute when continuous completion is unnecessary.

Applications and evaluation. The approach is used to improve user autonomy, reduce cognitive load, and limit unsolicited content in environments where input is frequent or sensitive. Evaluation typically considers user satisfaction, time to task completion, and frequency of unsolicited outputs. Safety and usability concerns include ensuring that helpfulness is not sacrificed and that users can easily switch to a more proactive or more restrained mode as needed.

See also. Auto-complete, Predictive text, Intermittent generation, Human-in-the-loop.