Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Amanda Stent, a natural language processing researcher at Bloomberg, said data scientists want to work with journalists to create mutually-beneficial solutions. “I see the newsroom working with data science to create very forward looking, fast and accurate journalism, both text and multimedia,” she said. “I think it’s incredibly exciting and really helps people who are consumers of media to make better decisions and be better informed.”

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks, said that humans need to begin to discuss the ethical implications of machine learning and to understand how machines interact with human experiences. “Our sense as human beings that we have this ability to be able to do things that machines can’t do is going to be challenged, and we need to start thinking about this,” he said.

Borthwick pointed to the fact that political bots had a significant impact on how Americans thought about the 2016 presidential candidates and how they voted.

Four years ago, The Washington Post covered two major news events the old-fashioned way.

For the Olympics in London, sports reporters tallied up the medal counts on television and hand-wrote briefs for the website. And when the election came around a few months later, four Post scribes took a look at election returns and hand-wrote lots of little results stories — who won what, and where.

This year, that work is being done by robots. Kind of.

Earlier today, The Washington Post announced it's joining the growing number of news organizations who are using language-generation technology to produce stories automatically.

Heliograf, a tool developed by The Washington Post's engineering team, will use data and language templates to generate automatic briefs on medal tallies, event schedules and competition results for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Those briefs will be fed into The Washington Post's main Olympics liveblog, which will also be home to stories written by the newspaper's sports reporters....