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Narrative Science is a privately held American-based computer software company whose main product, an artificial intelligence application called Quill, automatically turns raw, structured data into coherent natural language reporting.
History
[edit]Narrative Science was founded in 2010 in Evanston, Illinois, after starting at Northwestern University as an academic project in the Intelligent Information Laboratory.[1] The first prototype of the company technology went by the project name StatsMonkey and was developed in the laboratory by Kris Hammond, Larry Birnbaum, Nick Allen and John Templon.[1] StatsMonkey automatically generated news stories on baseball game recaps from applicable baseball game data such as players, game score, and win probability.[2] Narrative Science licensed StatsMonkey and the related intellectual property from Northwestern and began commercial operations in early 2010. [3]Afterwards the company developed a new artificial intelligence engine called Quill, which was designed to generate news articles, natural language business reports, and other types of text.[4] In 2013, the Company accepted a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel, a U.S. venture capital firm funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency.[5]
Products
[edit]Quill
[edit]Quill is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.[6] Kris Hammond explains the platform’s process as simply “mining data for meaning and insight.”[6] The broad idea of Quill is to add context to a company's numbers through a computer-written narrative, while saving a company’s staff from spending time doing template-driven work.[4] The company has applied Quill to many different industries but has a primary focus on Financial Services and governmental organizations.[4] To date, Quill can only write in English.[4]
Quill Engage
[edit]In March 2014, Narrative Science launched Quill Engage, a free Google Analytics application that delivers “plain English,” narrative style reports for website owners.[7] The application analyzes historical data and trends from Google Analytics to create both weekly and monthly reports which are delivered in narrative form.[7] Quill Engage reports key metrics and performance indicators to users, such as content engagement, web traffic and sources, referrals, paid search, and audience segmentation.[8]The technology is powered by Narrative Science's Quill platform.[8]
Competitors
[edit]Competing companies in the Narrative Analytics industry include Automated Insights[9], a firm based in Durham, North Carolina[10], and Yseop, Inc, a European firm headquartered in in Dallas, Texas.[10] Other similar companies in the area of natural language processing include Arria NLG[11] and Linguastat.
Criticism
[edit]The company received some early criticism from journalists speculating that Narrative Science was attempting to eliminate the jobs of writers, particularly in sports and finance.[12][13][14][15]
Critics also argue that biases and assumptions in original data sets can lead to reinforced bias in the stories generated by natural language processors[16], such as Narrative Science. Unlike traditional journalism, however, the computer-generated stories appear to be objective.[16] A CNN article compared artificially generated journalism in the financial sector to the property market bubble, as it leads to “everyone making investments in the same way for the same reasons”.[16]The article claimed that computer-generated narratives have the “potential to amplify biases and assumptions, but at far greater speed and on a far wider scale than anything written by humans.”[16]
An article from the Columbia Journalism School also criticized the limitations of “robo-journalism” software, as “it can’t assess the damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story” and therefore, lacks a necessary human element.[17]
See Also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b "Stats Monkey". Intelligent Information Laboratory. Northwestern University. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ "Program Creates Computer-Generated Sports Stories". NPR. NPR. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Bachman, Justin. "Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?". Business Week. Business Week. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b c d Wisniewski, Mary. "AI Startup Turns Data into Narrative — and Compliance Reports". American Banker. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Kafka, Peter. "The CIA Invests in Narrative Science and Its Automated Writers". All Things D. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b Weissman, Cale. "Taking data analysis to a new plateau: Narrative Science raises $11.5M". PandoDaily. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b Gesenhues, Amy. "New Free Google Analytics App From Narrative Science Creates Reports In "Plain English"". Marketing Land. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b Penn, David. "Narrative Science Launches Free App to Turn Data Into Readable Documents". The Finovate Group, Inc. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Diakopoulos, Nicholas. "Automated Stories: Using Algorithms to Craft News Content". Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Columbia Journalism School. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b Pletz, John. "Narrative Science gets $11.5 million to write next chapte". Crain's Chicago Business. Crain's. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ "Admission to Aim" (PDF). Arria. Arria. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Clark, Patrick. "Can an Algorithm Replace Stock Analysts?". Business Week. Business Week. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Levy, Steven. "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?". Wired. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Fassler, Joe. "Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?". The Atlantic. The Atlantic. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Hamburger, Ellis. "Robo-journalists are already writing the next generation of news stories". The Verge. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ a b c d Hefferman, Margaret. "The post was written by a human". CBS News. CBS. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
- ^ Howard, Alexander. "The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism" (PDF). Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Columbia Journalism School. Retrieved 6 June 2014.