Baseball league opens bidding to select operator of robot reporter

By Lim Chang-won Posted : March 29, 2019, 15:59 Updated : March 29, 2019, 15:59

[Courtesy of KBO]


SEOUL -- In a country where automated or robot journalism sounds unfamiliar, the governing body of South Korea's baseball leagues is pushing for the introduction of a prolific robot reporter called "KBOT" to provide game results fast in the form of human-readable news articles.

Professional baseball is the most popular sports in South Korea. The main league has ten franchises, and the second-tier Futures League consists of two divisions, Southern League and Northern League, which has six teams each.

The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) will open bidding on March 30 to select the operator of KBOT, which will churn out articles, based on Futures League game data on the score sheet. The winner will be decided on May 14.

"The company which will be selected through this bidding will be responsible for developing robotic algorithms that automatically produce articles for games of the KBO Futures League, producing articles, and computerizing the Futures League record data," the organization said Friday in a statement.

The robot reporter will automatically generate articles with game statics entered into its own algorithm, the KBO said, adding various data conversion is possible through an application program. It still requires human editing to turn the draft into readable articles to be published on the KBO website.

The KBO said its robot reporter can determine the importance of issues by constructing fixed weights and variable weights for each event. Using a sentence-generating algorithm, it can determine the flow of articles according to situation and context, and restrict repeated expressions with various template settings.

As the use of artificial intelligence software gets more frequent in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, some news outlets in the United States and other countries use robot reporters. However, automated journalism has been used very limitedly in South Korea.

In robot journalism, computer programs use an algorithm that scans large amounts of provided data, selects from an assortment of pre-programmed article structures, orders key points, and inserts details. Due to the formulaic nature of automation, it is mainly used for stories based on statistics and numerical figures. Common topics include sports recaps, weather, financial reports, real estate analysis, and earnings reviews.

Automated journalism free journalists from routine reporting, providing them with more time for complex tasks. It also allows efficiency and cost-cutting, alleviating some financial burden that many news organizations


 
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