admin On Thursday, China Science Daily announced that it has used software to automatically generate news stories about the latest discoveries from the world’s leading science journals.
The newspaper and researchers from Peking University co-created the robot science reporter, called “Xiaoke,” about half a year back.
It is the latest case of Chinese news organizations using algorithms to create content. According to its inventors, Xiaoke has generated over 200 stories base in the English abstract of papers published in journals such as Science, Nature, Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine.
The automatically generated articles will go through a review process before publication. A group of scientists and the newspaper’s editors will verify the content or give additional information.
Zhang Mingwei, head of the program and deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper, said inventors would make Xiaoke a “cross-linguistic academic secretary” to help Chinese scientists overcome language barriers and have easy and quick access to the latest scientific advances in English-language publication.
Wan Xiaojun, lead researcher of Peking University and in charge of the system’s design and technology, highlighted that the content generation tool could do far more than translation.
According to Wan, Xiaoke is good at selecting complex words and sentences, which can help turn articles full of confusing technical terms into easy and readable news reports.
The readers of the robot reporter is not limited to professionals but also includes the general public, the investors said.
Zhang further added “Science reporting is important in spreading information about discoveries and in popularizing knowledge to people. Manual review by science reporters will enable the robot-generated stories to get more people engaged,”.
Using the robot will also help save writing time compared with that of human journalists, said Zhang.
According to investors, more international journals, as well as conference and patent information, will be covered by the automated systems in the future.
In recent years, many Chinese news organizations have used robot-assisted systems to generate news stories about weather forecasts, sports and financial reports.
The China Science Daily is administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s highest academic institution in natural sciences. The newspaper is published five days a week, with a circulation of nearly 100,000 across the country.
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