Nick Diakopoulos reviews patents for some automatic journalism services and makes some informed observations about how they work. Take, for example, a computer working on a story on a baseball game: "The algorithm computes 'win probability' after every play. If win probability has a big delta in-between two plays it probably means something important just happened and the algorithm puts that on a list of events that might be worthy of inclusion in the final story."
June 27, 2014