Every robot journalist first needs to ingest a bunch of data. Data rich domains like weather were some of the first to have practical natural language generation systems. Now we’re seeing a lot of robot journalism applied to sports and finance — domains where the data can be standardized and made fairly clean. The development of sensor journalism may provide entirely new troves of data for producing automated stories. Key here is having clean and comprehensive data, so if you’re working in a domain that’s still stuck with PDFs or sparse access, the robots haven’t gotten there yet.

The Anatomy of a Robot Journalist | Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Advertisement