Search results for "news automation"
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Media councils and self-regulation in the emerging era of news automation
2020
This report introduces the present state of affairs in news automation and discusses what ethical considerations it raises in the work of media councils. Based on a European-wide research project, the three key takeaways are as follows:1) Large media players use automatically updated counters and infographics, but the automated gener-ation of news text is still mainly experimental in nature. We need to keep our eyes open to the possible need for self-regulatory guidance on news automation, though there are as yet no urgent issues. 2) We must not underestimate the technical progress already made in the field. Issues regarding data, agency and transparency should not be overlooked when discus…
Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
2020
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…