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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.
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.
so lol this will never happen
Before you criticize this summary, remember it's in Spanish. The English quality is not actually representative.
What will they think of next? What would we do without innovators like THESE??
Sports are entertainment not news
I'm a Cincinnati Bengals fan, so I'm sure the algorithm is pretty efficient.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Go sports team! Do the sports good and beat the opposing sports team!
Circumcision is child abuse.
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'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.
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.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
fagots who constantly source vice.com articles as actual news sources
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.
You got modded down, because you posted A/C. That is because the mods are a bunch of sheep that can't think for themselves. I'm tired of this fucking broken mod system.
Hey Whiplash, howzabout you hide usernames during the modding process, so the mods don't blindly mod somebody down, simply because they posted A/C?
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.
Somebody - or something - does not not the first thing about football. Or soccer, as it is called this side of the pond.
So it takes perfectly good statistical data and turns it into wordy, clichéd prose? What will retired althetes do now?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
They don't like hearing the truth, so they try to hide it by modding it down.
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!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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" );
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.
-Dave
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Just look at the gibberish yahoo auto-generates for its' fantasy sports pages.
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.
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.
Wake me up when this algorithm can compete with the Cricket commentators on Sky, talking about the lovely cakes they've been sent.