Member Article

AX Semantics Trial Robot Words Throughout U.S. Election

AX Semantics is one of the pioneers of robot journalism. The most recent project from the German start-up is a research project focused on the U.S. presidential election, in which from January until the election day on November 8, 2016 it will create automated stories based on projection data. Together with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and Deutsche Welle, AX Semantics will analyze readers’ acceptance and understanding of automated content. The ambitious project is supported financially by the Volkswagen Foundation.

SCIENTISTS TO ANALYZE USER ACCEPTANCE

The election campaign for the U.S. presidency is slowly gathering pace, while the process to determine the Republican and Democrat candidates is already in full swing. The race for the White House is being followed with close interest all around the world, with a particularly strong focus on the forecasts of the result. The website pollyvote.com, which was founded by prestigious scientists and US college professors, delivered highly accurate forecasts of the last U.S. presidential election in 2012. Under the leadership of Dr. Andreas Graefe, the portal supplies a database for the artificial intelligence software AX Semantics to use for automatically creating descriptive stories. Deutsche Welle is responsible for data visualisation tasks and communication of the project’s progress and results to the global Data Journalism community. The goal of the project, which is being supported by the Volkswagen Foundation to the tune of over 100,000 euro, is to analyze users’ acceptance and understanding of automated stories and interactive infographics.

CODE USED FOR THE SELF-LEARNING SOFTWARE IS ACCESSIBLE

“During the election campaign we will publish stories on pollyvote.com. These stories are based on new projection data and will be published with increasing frequency as the day of the election nears,” says Frank Feulner, CTO at AX Semantics. “It will be a real litmus test. We’re hoping for valid evidence about the opportunities and boundaries of robot journalism – for future projects that we will implement with publishers and the media, too.” The whole project will run for over one year, starting at the beginning of November at Europe’s largest technology conference, the Web Summit in Dublin. CTO Frank Feulner will be among the AX Semantics representatives at the event. The development of the project can be followed step by step at pollyvote.com. In order to provide algorithmic transparency, the ATML code that AX used to learn how to write its forecast stories will also be published.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Pacini .