An Algorithm May Soon Cover Your Local Sports Team (vice.com)

Sam Edwards, writing for Motherboard: A Spanish startup is promising to revolutionize readers' access to often unreported news. The unreported news in question, however, is not overlooked disasters or under-reported tragedies in far-flung countries, but minor league sporting events. David Llorente, co-founder of Narrativa, said was inspired to develop an AI-powered content generation system after he tried fruitlessly to find coverage of minor league soccer games from other countries in his native Spanish. "There are people interested in these things, in these leagues, in these kind of sports," he told Motherboard. "The idea was to focus on regional sports. I wanted to write about football, but about Japanese football in Spanish, to cover this niche." Sevilla won with a resounding 20 against Athletic in Nervion, where the sum up eight straight wins at home. Gameiro scored the first one for the locals and closed the scoreboard by converting a penalty kick after Kychowiak was fouled. Athletic was unlucky despite controlling ball possession and wasn't able to finish any of the numerous chances that they had. -- Narrativa game summary.
Narrativa is part of the booming automatic content generation industry which uses algorithms to convert data sets into narratives. Related: How a robot wrote for Engadget.

Comments

its fine really.

[nimbius]

I'm a Cincinnati Bengals fan, so I'm sure the algorithm is pretty efficient.

Go sports team!

[Stormwatch]

Go sports team! Do the sports good and beat the opposing sports team!

Re:Sports are not news

[Anonymous Coward]

News are entertainment not news

FTFY.

Another art made useless

[holophrastic]

Once again, sports -- and by extension sports commentary -- is a form of artistic expression (outside of the business of sports, of course). If an algorithm can give me the commentary, then I'm not interested in that commentary at all. It doesn't express a human-art, and therefore it contributes nothing of value to my day.

Re:Another art made useless

[DogDude]

What could possibly happen in sports that hasn't happened a million times, already? What could be so interesting as to require a human to explain it? Listening to people "report" about sports is already mind-numbing, because people just say the same stuff over and over. The players "really wanted to win"? The team "gave 110%"? The coach is "disappointed that they lost"? The person kicked/threw the ball really far? I would argue that there isn't any "art" in reporting on sports at all, because there's virtually no creativity involved in sports.

Re:Another art made useless

[Sowelu]

I'd say there's art in telling (some) stories, even if the listener has heard it before. YMMV which ones are interesting. Helps if you have emotional investment in one of the teams, whether there's any point to it or not.

Re:Another art made useless

[holophrastic]

My point is that in those cases, it's the "telling" that's art, not the "hearing". When an algorithm does the telling, there's no art left.

I really don't care about what a computer has to say about a game. For that reason, I'm not interested in hearing it.

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. That's what I'm saying. "Ball thrown" "Ball caught"

But instead, it's endless dribble about completely irrelevant statistics that are somewhat related to a player, such as trying to correlate their batting average to the number of DUI arrests Player X had last month. Followed by "You know... back in 1988, I remember this one game...." Meanwhile everyone checks Facebook to see if anything interesting is happening in the world, like a terrorist attack the local Arby's. The ONLY piece of information i am interested in is: Did the Lions lose again? I fucking hope so.

I don't even know how people can get into regular sports. A bunch of overpaid whiny bitches crying about inane technical issues like did he have full possession of the ball with one foot down on an even numbered day of the week while Jupiter and Mars are in alignment. No... it should be simple... did he get the fucking ball over the line without using a pickup truck? Yes or no.

Sports need to be 1) simpler and 2) code of the gladiator. If NASCAR had half the cars driving clockwise and half driving counterclockwise, with routine crashes that killed several drivers and, preferably, 4-5 fans in the stadium... I could get into that. Same with golf.... that's normally like watching paint dry. Now, add land mines in the sand traps, starving alligators in the water, snipers in the trees... I could get into that... then there would be some use for sports commentary ("Whoa Chuck! Did you just see the way his head exploded? Pull up the replay on that shit")

Re:Another art made useless

[superposed]

Once again, sports -- and by extension sports commentary -- is a form of artistic expression (outside of the business of sports, of course). If an algorithm can give me the commentary, then I'm not interested in that commentary at all. It doesn't express a human-art, and therefore it contributes nothing of value to my day.

I wouldn't expect to be uplifted by the soaring prose of a minor-league sports report, unless they've singled out an exceptional minor-league game, which is a different goal from this project. For run-of-the-mill sports reporting, doesn't most of the "art" consist of identifying important or unusual details of the game -- which play changed the momentum from one team to another, which player(s) performed better or got more playtime than they usually do, how well or poorly the great player(s) performed? That's all legitimate grounds for AI, and an AI story that reported these details would save you a lot of time vs. reading the play-by-play report yourself.

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

well this applies to lots of other things or maybe all human activities which by nature of things happen and then again and again.
If you lead this thought process till its logical end you will realize that there is nothing there. Or at least there is no human there but automated nothing. This is not to say we should not automate as much as possible to free us from mindless or even dangerous things. Yet I have impression that what awaits us there is not Star Trek society but poverty, corruption and conflict ridden society of star wars variety.

Re:Another art made useless

[NatasRevol]

Well, perhaps you forgot that just last week, Facebook's AI picked up a fake news report & ran it as real news. Just days after they fired their human editors.

So, there's all kinds of hilarity to be expected.

Re:Another art made useless

[Sowelu]

I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm. At least I'd hope so, since I've got a hobby project involving algorithmic writing. I might be biased.

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're watching the wrong sport and/or sports coverage. Lots of new things happen - records are broken, unusual plays happen for the first time, players have their best/worst game/season, etc. Outside of the major media markets though, a lot of sports reporting is barely better than an automated algorithm (though your examples would only be found in the absolute worst form of reporting, likely a transcript of a worthless postgame interview). And in the lower levels, the story is less about the result of the game and more about player development, which is much harder to quantify. But hey, I'm sure whatever you consider to be "art" doesn't involve anything that has ever been done before in any way and we're just not evolved enough to appreciate it.

Re:Another art made useless

[jimbolauski]

You could replace many commentators with robots and not miss a thing. Commentating is 80% filling dead air with cliches 19.999% relaying what just happened and 0.001% actual insight.

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Some game commentary sounds like a description of a gay orgy. Is that what you'll miss?

Henderson slaps it hard!
Brownstein takes it in the rear and pushes it back out.

etc

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

For run-of-the-mill sports reporting, doesn't most of the "art" consist of identifying important or unusual details of the game -- which play changed the momentum from one team to another, which player(s) performed better or got more playtime than they usually do, how well or poorly the great player(s) performed? That's all legitimate grounds for AI, and an AI story that reported these details would save you a lot of time vs. reading the play-by-play report yourself.

Except you can't get those details from the play-by-play. "Momentum" isn't really a thing in sports, that's just part of the human-contrived narrative. The raw details of what happened don't give you enough information to determine who performed well/poorly in the sample size of one game; the variance in difficulty and random chance is so great at that level that you're all over the map in the process vs. result matrix. It still takes a human to properly evaluate what happens in a game and even that has been changing significantly in the last few years as more data has become available. If humans can't even properly define these things yet, how can an AI be programmed to do it?

Re:Another art made useless

[superposed]

Who said anything about a sample size of one game? AI can "remember" the details of every game, and identify how this game is different from others. Think of it as an "anomaly reporter", which is a lot of what people want from a sports report. That's well within the abilities of an AI. Even momentum is discernible by AI, arguably better than a human. If one team had unusually good performance during a certain span of time, that's "momentum". Sure, humans can spot patterns like this (or sometimes false patterns), but that doesn't mean a computer can't. And are you willing to pay enough for minor-league sports stories to hire the army of human reporters that would be needed to follow every team and judge their performance compared to prior games?

Re:Another art made useless

[holophrastic]

Oh, certainly. But that's for the documentary on how-it's-made, not for the consumer listening to it.

Re:Another art made useless

[holophrastic]

But that's exactly what makes it an art. It's about choosing which 80%, which 19.999%, and which 0.001%. That's the expression.

This is slashdot. Every week we read another "high school class sends camera into space for under $100, gets photos as good as nasa" article. But that high school class got 100 random photos, once. Nasa gets the photo they wanted, of the object they wanted.

It's the very selection that's the art.

Re:Another art made useless

[ShanghaiBill]

I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm.

I doubt if there is any art in it. You just take the statistics of a zillion sports games, and the articles written about them by humans, and shove it into a ML system. Then cycle through them until the system learns to generate reasonable articles from the data.

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Your opinion is wrong, just because the bottom tier of sports writing is bad that does not make the whole endeavor pointless. See DFW's writing on Tennis: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Re:Another art made useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about a sample size of one game? AI can "remember" the details of every game, and identify how this game is different from others.

You did, right there. Regardless of what you're comparing it to (or whether such a comparison is even valid), the data you're working with is from a single game. The "anomalies" you'll find will come from a lot of different sources, many unrelated to individual player performance and resulting from factors that are not recorded. The AI might be able to find anomalies, but it will not be able to determine which ones are meaningful; even humans have a very hard time with that.

Momentum is not a thing. Several high variance factors swinging the same way at the same time has no predictive value at the highest levels. In the minors, even less so.

And are you willing to pay enough for minor-league sports stories to hire the army of human reporters that would be needed to follow every team and judge their performance compared to prior games?

No, because that kind of analysis would be meaningless. Performance is a combination of process, quality of the opposition, and a lot of random chance and/or other unquantifiable factors. For minor league sports, all three will vary significantly from game to game (and in different ways over time), rendering a game-to-previous-games comparison pointless. What you need to do is isolate the process, evaluate that relative to the expectations for the level (not all skills develop at the same time), and look at the results only when there is a meaningful sample available for the current process form (which often is not possible). Even then, so much of the analysis is based on unreliable projections that this is still essentially guesswork. It's a big GIGO process where we don't even have a good idea of what garbage we're putting in. Don't expect AI to magically fix it.

Re:Another art made useless

[superposed]

It's a big GIGO process where we don't even have a good idea of what garbage we're putting in. Don't expect AI to magically fix it.

You are basically arguing that human-written stories of this ilk are baseless and AI-written stories will be no better. I agree, but I would say an AI system can probably do this job as well as a person, and for less money. So an AI system could satisfy people who want to read stories about "momentum" or unusual performance, even though those are often just apparent patterns in the noise. You are not in that group of readers and neither am I, but that doesn't mean the AI is ill-suited to this job. And for minor-league teams the job won't get done at all without an AI, because the market is too small to pay real people to do it.

So basically the Football Manager games

[Sowelu]

I'm ashamed at how many hours I wasted on the 2012 version of that. It was pretty good at algorithmic descriptions most of the time, but its stockpile of phrases during matches left a lot to be decided. I shouldn't see "He puts the ball in row Z!!" several times a match, especially when someone just barely gets a ball into the stands. Oh well.

I keep thinking "This year's version will be better", then remembering the life I got back when I stopped playing.

Re:So basically the Football Manager games

[Sowelu]

...left a lot to be desired. Sure does take a long time to wake up after a three day weekend.

Do not want

[fph il quozientatore]

No, thanks. Just give me the scoreboard and stats and I can read the data myself. I don't need a robotic overlord to dumb it down into humanspeak.

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did I get modded down? The English translation sucks. Did someone think I was being prejudiced or something?

i heard that slashdot is ran by fagots

[Anonymous Coward]

fagots who constantly source vice.com articles as actual news sources

Re:i heard that slashdot is ran by fagots

[Anonymous Coward]

Truer words have never been spoken

"Soon" as in "4 years ago"?

[mrbene]

Pretty sure Narrative Science has been doing this since 2012. At least for Little League.

Also, their competitor Automated Insights offered API access to small parties last year. Maybe "local sports" is too big?

Maybe this is new for Spain?

Regardless, seems like entry level writing positions are going to be more difficult to come by, at least for humans.

Re:Using AI for content generation?

[NatasRevol]

Just wait for the AI to not detect trolls.

Derek Jeter on the trading block to the Xatalal Bats???

AI and Stakes

[blueshift_1]

The problem that I see is that good commentary creates the narrative of the game. Sports has not actual intrinsic stakes for most fans (short of a few bets here and there), but the commentators and news sources allow for us to be fed a narrative of how much the underdogs have overcome by strength of will to make it this point, etc etc. I question the current AI's ability to do this coherently and not just report who won and what happened. Because in general, that's rather uninteresting.

Re:Using AI for content generation?

[Anonymous Coward]

the Kansas City Klingons are playing tonight

A resounding 20?

[OneHundredAndTen]

Somebody - or something - does not not the first thing about football. Or soccer, as it is called this side of the pond.

Re:Using AI for content generation?

[NatasRevol]

versus the Toledo Mud Hens?

What will retired althetes do now?

[Comboman]

So it takes perfectly good statistical data and turns it into wordy, clichéd prose? What will retired althetes do now?

See what I mean, Whiplash?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't like hearing the truth, so they try to hide it by modding it down.

Re:Using AI for content generation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who downmodded this, a Slashdot editor who was jealous of the big media outlets who've been doing this for years?

Babel II, here we come!

[Thud457]

Read about one weird trick that ROBOTS are using to STEAL our JOBS...
You won't BELIEVE what happens NEXT!
KITTENS after the break
Learn about Obama's program to refinance you latte, banks hate it!

I like formula 1

[JustNiz]

Easy for my favourite sport:

while ( stillRacing )
      {
      printf( "Hamilton is 1st, Rosberg is 2nd, Button is nowhere to be seen\n" );
      sleep( 10 );
      }
printf( "Hamilton won\n" );

blah

[bigdavex]

If an algorithm can produce the commentary, then a format more orderly than paragraphs of text (e.g., a box score) will convey that same information better.

Most things said and written about sports are vapid by Sturgeon's Law.

Re:blah

[Gussington]

Most things said and written about sports are vapid by Sturgeon's Law.

I think it depends on the context. A lot of sports reporting is high level fluff that can probably be automated. But my chosen code, I follow ex-players and coaches who get semi-privileged information directly from their peers they used to share the locker room with. They also have insight into the nuances a desk journalist or robot just can't cover.
So there is an evolution there. General results will be covered by robots, but if you want the gritty emotional details you'll still need a human.

All your sports are belong to us

[rickb928]

And it doesn't seem worse than any other method.

In fact, ESPN seems to be doing this already - in NFL news their regional, conference, and team news spews regularly take on the same flavor, for instance, a topic of 'Top Five Special Teamers' or something similarly predictable and generic will pop up, especially in the off-season when there is, in fact, a lack of 24 hour cycle news.

Blah. The spew is already robotic. Just dispense with the meat robots.

Still can't do it properly

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the gibberish yahoo auto-generates for its' fantasy sports pages.

Re:Sports are not news

[AthanasiusKircher]

Sports are entertainment not news

News are entertainment not news

FTFY.

How 'bout: News are entertainment. Full stop.

Seriously -- news is mostly entertainment and has been throughout history. Back in the day, you used to have "one stop shopping" for your entertainment in your wandering bard.

The bard was part pop singer, part storyteller, part news reporter ("Have you heard about the plague that has hit far in the east? Or the new queen in the north?"), and part random showman.

Nowadays, we've split these tasks up -- the pop singers are self-explanatory, the storytellers have been split among film/tv and romance novels, and the news reporting is... about as bad as it's ever been.

Just think of the word: news. Isn't it a silly word? Sounds like when a some young kids can't be bothered to talk about senior citizens (too many syllables) and call them "the olds."

Anyhow, the weird thing is that among all of that previous bard entertainment, the "news" for some reason has acquired this association with intellect -- good, moral, upright citizens should be INFORMED by the "news." Whereas nobody looks down on you intellectually if you haven't heard the latest pop hit or the latest romance comedy -- in fact, you might be admired in intellectual circles more for avoiding such ephemera.

If you're a "news junkie" or even just spend a 30 minutes everyday ritualistically watching the 6 o'clock news or reading the newspaper or visiting the same online site for news, try taking a week off sometime. Then go back and see how much you missed that actually mattered. Instead, take that time and read something real -- a book or an in-depth essay on some current issue, perhaps. Knowing stuff requires effort, digesting complex issues, thinking over detailed material. The news is none of these things -- it's spoon-fed infotainment at best, and just plain entertainment at worst.

Niche market

[azaana]

How many people want to read about Japanese football in Spanish? I understand people of the country wanting know about the regional sport in their country but not the regional sport from halfway around the world that isn't even a hub for that particular sport.

Agreed!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This mod system needs some serious reform to stop bias against A/Cs.

Mods should be modding based on what is being said, not who is saying it, or their posting history.

Cricket

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when this algorithm can compete with the Cricket commentators on Sky, talking about the lovely cakes they've been sent.