Natural Language Generation: Communicating with the New Machine

The world of Big Data is at an inflection point. We now have well understood methods for metering, monitoring, gathering and analyzing massive data sets in business, government, public policy and our day-to-day lives. Mechanisms for large-scale analysis of the data sets we now control can discover powerful correlations, historical trends and operational predications. All of this has been achieved through exceptional technical developments in scale and analytics. More recently, the rise of machine learning has given us even greater power to mine our data for information. But this is not the end of the game. In fact, it is only the first step in making these insights available and useful to the decision makers who need them. In this talk, I will outline how the technology of automatic narrative generation from data plays the crucial role of bridging the gap between the Big Data world of facts and figures and the still unmet need for understandable insights. I will dive into use cases from business, education and the still untapped world of social media and show how the power of automatically generated narratives can provide us all with the evidence and articulation of the insights that are still trapped in the massive data repositories we now control.