2017 Reports

Computational Campaign Coverage

Graefe, Andreas

Algorithms for automatically generating stories from machine-readable data have been shaking up the news industry, not least since the Associated Press started to automate the production and publication of quarterly earnings reports in 2014. Once developed, such algorithms can create an unlimited number of news stories for a routine and repetitive topic—faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors than any human journalist ever could. Within the “Computational Campaign Coverage” research project, researchers teamed up with the German-based software company AX Semantics to develop automated news based on forecasting data for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Over the course of the project, nearly 22,000 automated news articles were published in English and German.