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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
editNarrative 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
editQuill
editQuill 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
editIn 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
editCompeting 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
editThe 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
editReferences
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.