Artificial intelligence and data science are rapidly transforming the processes of collecting, selecting, producing and distributing news to newsrooms around the world, including with regards to covering the Covid-19 emergency.
Ansa experiences these processes thanks to the collaboration with the American company Applied XLab (appliedxl.com).
WATCH COVID-19 evolution in Italy News generated with artificial intelligence by Applied XLabs in collaboration with the Italian Government data task force. Data source: Department of Civil Protection
In this case it concerns the creation of a fully automated flow which, starting from the data provided by the Civil Protection, produces real-time news and graphs on the progress of the Covid-19 epidemic at national level and for each individual Italian region.
The technology used is the Natural Language Generation (NLG), capable of producing texts from data, providing multiple variants of the same story, as happens, in this case, for news that tell the situation at a regional level.
The project stems from the pro bono collaboration of Francesco Marconi - founder of Applied XLab - with the task force of the Italian government to help Civil Protection to distribute information on the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic. "In the current crisis, we immediately understood how important data is to save lives and help medical and healthcare personnel make decisions quickly and consciously," explained Marconi. "The goal of using AI and automating news is not to replace journalists - says Marco Pratellesi, who participated in the Italian project - On the contrary, it is about freeing them from repetitive tasks, which in some cases even absorb a lot time, so that they can devote themselves to in-depth analyzes, people's stories, interviews, analyzes, investigative journalism and the narration of the scenarios from the front line, in a word to the quality of journalism that still makes the difference ".
