Writers beware the robot journalist is here. Narrative Science is a start up that has developed a piece of software that takes data and makes it into news articles. It is seen as a definitive step towards artificial intelligence by the Evanston, Illinois based company.
The computer wrote a news brief within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-UNLV football game. It went something like this, "Wisconsin appears to be in the driver's seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3."
Artificial intelligence is the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning and this clever code makes the cut. It takes it a whole lot beyond the previously written formula based, fill in the blank style, articles that were written by automation a few years ago.
Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University are also the co founders of Narrative Science. They claim that the articles written by their software are different. In fact they have lofty hopes of winning a Pulitzer within the next five years.
Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington agrees. The quality of the narrative produced was quite good, as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith he said. He added that the company’s accomplishment pointed to a new trend in computing, that of the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.