Automated Journalism 2.0

Event-driven narratives

Bibliographic Data

ID12909449
AuthorsDavid Caswell (0009-0007-9845-6709, University of Missouri, corresponding author), Konstantin Dörr (University of Zurich)
Year2017
Volume12
Issue4
Pages477-496
Publication date2017-05-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism Practice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1751-2786 • E-ISSN: 1751-2794
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17512786.2017.1320773
OpenAlexW2613288513
LanguageEN
Citations received64
References cited39

This article introduces an exploratory computational approach to extending the realm of automated journalism from simple descriptions to richer and more complex event-­driven narratives, based on original applied research in structured journalism. The practice of automated journalism is reviewed and a major constraint on the potential to automate journalistic writing is identified, namely the absence of data models sufficient to encode the journalistic knowledge necessary for automatically writing event-driven narratives. A detailed proposal addressing this constraint is presented, based on the representation of journalistic knowledge as structured event and structured narrative data. We describe a prototyped database of structured events and narratives, and introduce two methods of using event and narrative data from the prototyped database to provide journalistic knowledge to a commercial automated writing platform. Detailed examples of the use of each method are provided, including a successful application of the approach to stories about car chases, from initial data reporting through to automatically generated text. A framework for evaluating automatically generated event-driven narratives is proposed, several technical and editorial challenges to applying the approach in practice are discussed, and several high-level conclusions about the importance of data structures in automated journalism workflows are provided

Closed captioning · Constraint (computer-aided design · Data science · Database · Event (particle physics · Journalism · Linguistics · Media studies · Narrative · Realm · Representation (politics · Sociology · Workflow · Artificial Intelligence in Games · Computer Science · Engineering · History · Topic Modeling · Web Data Mining and Analysis · Artificial Intelligence

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