

Automated Insights Generates Several Million Fantasy Sports Articles - bwsewell
http://automatedinsights.com/yahoo

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ryanwaggoner
Serious question: how is Google going to deal with the advent of technologies
like this being used to create billions of pretty decent pieces of content?

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srehnborg
This is awesome because the most fun I have in fantasy leagues is the
interaction with the people I am playing against. So this just takes it to a
next level and provides a recap like the normal NFL games.

Good to see a Durham, NC company get some love.

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mariusz79
For some reason, I think that this will only add to our existing problem of
having too much data to digest, but no way to reasonably digest it. In other
words - we need a way to extract valuable data from millions of articles, not
generate millions more.

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mikeyouse
I don't know that this helps or hurts anything really, what they're really
doing (for this example at least) is translating stat lines to text.

It's pretty easy to say something like:

This week's top quarterback was %qb% from the %team1% who had %qbyards% and
%qbtds% while playing the %team2%.

The total amount of information is exactly the same, they just use a little
NLP to make it sound 'hand written' but display a box score in a easier to
read manner.

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RobbieStats
The technology is significantly more complicated than simple search and
replace a bunch of variables. Trust me, if we did millions of stories by
swapping out the same sentence every time it wouldn't work.

Also, the part of the value of what we do is describe "insights" not just spit
back raw numbers (which again wouldn't be very valuable).

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mikeyouse
I didn't mean to demean the work, there is clearly a whole lot going on behind
the scenes here. It was more of a rebuttal of the "more data is bad" idea. My
point above was unclear, but this idea doesn't necessarily represent more
data, just the same data presented in a more human-friendly manner.

I really like what the team has done, this could have a long-lasting impact on
anything with heavy use of stats and figures. I honestly have a few enterprise
applications that would benefit from a similar treatment. e.g. reports that
aggregate certain operational stats and must be hand-written every week.

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majormajor
This is pretty cool. It's very personalized—it would never make sense for
Yahoo to hire people to write recap for fantasy games, since those recaps are
going to be of interest only to the participants in the league (and maybe only
to the two players in the particular game). But it makes sense to have a
program write recaps for all those individual games instead of just showing
box scores or whatever they had before (I don't play fantasy football
myself... it feels too much like work for me, messing around with spreadsheets
and numbers and algorithms!).

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RobbieStats
Here is a good write-up with examples of what the recaps look like if you
aren't in a Yahoo league: [http://www.fantasycube.com/nfl/robots-write-
fantasy-football...](http://www.fantasycube.com/nfl/robots-write-fantasy-
football-yahoo-10349)

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Travis
I think this is pretty neat, although it does come with many unintended
consequences for spam.

Does anyone have more information on the technology they use to generate these
articles? I assume some sort of NLP in reverse (natural language generation, I
guess?)

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qq66
I think this company is fascinating in its approach -- most companies are
trying to automate the analysis of human-generated content where they are
automating the generation of human-analyzable content.

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dotborg
Good Luck Google!

