Building a Robot Journalist – Bakken & Bæck

Automation and algorithms already play a big role in the media industry. Programmatic advertising, algorithm-operated front pages and machine translation are some of the ways automation has infiltrated the news desk. So-called "robot journalists" are another blooming example of automation in the newsroom. The name is a bit disingenuous, since it's not really a robot, nor really a journalist, but an algorithm. By the use of Natural Language Generation (NLG), the algorithm generates text from a pool of data, and writes the text based on a set of predefined rules and templates.