A debate on the use of artificial intelligence, as an electronic line judge, for line calls in tennis

Abstract

The human factor in decision-making in tennis, like so many sports, plays a fundamental part of its ambience and/or drama or entertainment. This is because some line calls by some line umpires can be dubious, or even incorrect. In tennis events that allow for challenges to line calls, an artificial intelligence-based referee, in the form of electronic line calling (ELC), is then used to resolve the challenge, and the result is handed out by the chair umpire. This commentary debates the merits and demerits that may be associated with the total elimination of human line umpires by employing ELC.

Keywords:

• AI-assisted line calls
• ATP (association of tennis professionals)
• challenges
• electronic line calling (ELC)
• line umpires (LUs) and chair umpires (CUs)
• sensitivity

Authors’ contributions

The authors contributed equally to researching the topic matter, debating it, writing and editing of the final versions of the paper.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors, and should not be construed as the views of the organizations for which they work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We note that while this point is true, as professionals, players need to deal with such situations, as this is part and parcel of the game. Moreover, such moments can bring excitement to the game and for spectators, even more so when players argue with, or challenge, umpires.

2 Apart from this claim by Mlakar and Kovalchik (2020), we were unable to identify any data-based source of this information, even on the company website: https://www.hawkeyeinnovations.com/. However, we managed to trace a PDF document from the previous company website, archived at the Internet Archive, that confirmed this value: https://web.archive.org/web/20160310011907/http://www.hawkeyeinnovations.co.uk/products/ball-tracking/electronic-line-calling

3 https://www.hawkeyeinnovations.com/

4 http://www.foxtenn.com/in&out

5 https://www.imgarena.com/