AI decided to engage in commenting on sporting events.

Narrativa is a startup from Spain whose goal is to develop a platform capable of briefly describing sports events. This may be, for example, multilingual news about the successes or failures of various teams from a number of countries. The fact is that small sports teams (the same football) have quite a lot of fans who have nowhere to get information about their favorites.

David Llorente, one of the founders of the startup, says he decided to create a similar project after he could not find information in Spanish on the network about his beloved foreign team. This team is not a world champion or at least Europe, but Yorente likes her very much.

“There are people who are interested in learning about such teams in various sports,” he says. “The idea is to focus on regional sport. I want to write about football, but about Japanese football for the Spaniards, to provide such information. "
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Sevilla won the “Athletic” in Nervion, resulting in 8 clear victories at home. Gameyro scored the first goal and finished the penalty shootout after Kochovyak was sent off. "Athletic" was unlucky: despite the constant possession of the ball, the team did not realize a number of potential scoring situations "- this is part of the text written by the Narrativa system.

Narrativa is one of the content generation systems that can convert dry data sets into sports news and descriptions. There are a lot of similar companies. One of them is Narrative Science from the USA. This company managed to get quite impressive investments from several US investment funds. Another company, Idealo, is also developing a system for automatic content generation. The goal is to automate the writing of news in paragraph 1-2 of a number of topics.

Giants such as the Associated Press and Reuters are also working to create their own systems for generating content, and quite successfully. Another media, the Washington Post, recently used a system for generating news on the events of the Olympic Games.

Most of these systems, including Narrativa, work on a narrow circle of topics . This is mainly sports, finance, economy. Those little, but most of them are in demand by readers.

The founders of Narrativa met in one of the Spanish universities, and decided to start working together to create a content generation system, which in some cases can replace a person.

“Imagine that you are entering new information about a sports game and your favorite team. Also, you would like to know how the weather can affect the outcome of the game. In our case, it is quite possible that the system will be able to collect the necessary data on its own and provide it in the form of news or description, ”says the founder of Narrativa. David Yorente argues that the system will be able to predict the outcome of the game teams, both in bad and good weather.



The goal of Narrativa is to create short news that will not repeat each other. Each news is a description of the original event and the result of the sports team. So far, a team of three journalists has been looking at the work of the system, but in the near future, as Yorente hopes, everything will work in fully automatic mode.

So far, they are unable to completely replace people and other automatic content generation systems. They are designed, as mentioned above, to create content that represents 1-2 paragraphs of text. Journalists do not like to create this kind of news, so the attitude to such materials is appropriate. Machine texts will be able to remove some of the boring duties from human journalists.

Professionals will be able to work in more responsible areas, writing materials of another kind. Boring announcements perform cars. In January 2015, AP announced that every quarter its automatic content generation system generates more than 3000 short financial and economic news. This is dozens of times more than human journalists could have done before.

Yorente and his colleagues believe that despite some difficulties and skepticism of some representatives of the media industry, content generation systems will gradually develop and in a few years will take a worthy place in business journalism.

“So it will be. It will become the standard in five or ten years, ”says Yorente.

“Probably, the work of human journalists will become more interesting. Especially for those who do not like to write dry and boring announcements and news. ”