Robot Journalism in Germany

By chance, I came across a short post by uber-ddj developer Lorenz Matzat (@lorz) on robot journalism over the weekend: Robot journalism: Revving the writing engines. Along with a mention of Narrative Science, it namechecked another company that was new to me: [b]ased in Berlin, Retresco offers a “text engine” that is now used by the German football portal “FussiFreunde”.

A quick scout around brought up this Retresco post on Publishing Automation: An opportunity for profitable online journalism [translated] and their robot journalism pitch, which includes “weekly automatic Game Previews to all amateur and professional football leagues and with the start of the new season for every Game and detailed follow-up reports with analyses and evaluations” [translated], as well as finance and weather reporting.

I asked Lorenz if he was dabbling with such things and he pointed me to AX Semantics (an Aexea GmbH project). It seems their robot football reporting product has been around for getting on for a year (Robot Journalism: Application areas and potential[translated]) or so, which makes me wonder how siloed my reading has been in this area.

Anyway, it seems as if AX Semantics have big dreams. Like heralding Media 4.0: The Future of News Produced by Man and Machine:

The starting point for Media 4.0 is a whole host of data sources. They share structured information such as weather data, sports results, stock prices and trading figures. AX Semantics then sorts this data and filters it. The automated systems inside the software then spot patterns in the information using detection techniques that revolve around rule-based semantic conclusion. By pooling pertinent information, the system automatically pulls together an article. Editors tell the system which layout and text design to use so that the length and structure of the final output matches the required media format – with the right headers, subheaders, the right number and length of paragraphs, etc. Re-enter homo sapiens: journalists carefully craft the information into linguistically appropriate wording and liven things up with their own sugar and spice. Using these methods, the AX Semantics system is currently able to produce texts in 11 languages. The finishing touches are added by the final editor, if necessary livening up the text with extra content, images and diagrams. Finally, the text is proofread and prepared for publication.

A key technology bit is the analysis part: “the software then spot patterns in the information using detection techniques that revolve around rule-based semantic conclusion”. Spotting patterns and events in datasets is an area where automated journalism can help navigate the data beat and highlight things of interest to the journalist (see for example Notes on Robot Churnalism, Part I – Robot Writers for other takes on the robot journalism process). If notable features take the form of possible story points, narrative content can then be generated from them.

To support the process, it seems as if AX Semantics have been working on a markup language: ATML3 (I’m not sure what it stands for? I’d hazard a guess at something like “Automated Text ML” but could be very wrong…) A private beta seems to be in operation around it, but some hints at tooling are starting to appear in the form of ATML3 plugins for the Atom editor.

One to watch, I think…