Linguistic recycling : The process of quoting in increasingly mediatized settings

“She said that he said that they said…” – This issue of the AILA Review focuses on practices of quoting by which language is recycled in new contexts, transgressing formerly clear boundaries in environments of increasing mediatization. In the introduction, we first present working definitions of our topic’s key terms (Part 1). Then, we go through the topics, outcomes, and main interconnections of the ten approaches as discussed in the papers of this issue (Part 2). Based on the insights from the discussion so far, we develop a systematic framework to analyze the formal, functional, and procedural aspects of linguistic recycling (Part 3). Finally, we touch some of the white spots of this iss…

News Automation : The rewards, risks and realities of ‘machine journalism’

Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot

Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…