Narrative Science

Last updated
Narrative Science
Company type Private
Industry
FoundedJanuary 2010;14 years ago (2010-01)
Founder
  • Larry Birnbaum
  • Stuart Frankel
  • Nick Beil
  • Kris Hammond
FateSold to Salesforce and Integrated into Tableau Software
Headquarters
Chicago, Illinois
,
U.S.
Products
  • Lexio
    Quill
Parent Salesforce

Narrative Science was a natural language generation company based in Chicago, Illinois, that specialized in data storytelling. As of December 17, 2021, Narrative Science was acquired by Salesforce [1] and has been integrated into Salesforce's Tableau Software.

Contents

History

Narrative Science was founded in 2010 in Evanston, Illinois, after a student project in the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University jump started the NLG technology. [2] The first prototype of the company technology went by the project name StatsMonkey and was developed in the laboratory by Kris Hammond, Larry Birnbaum, Nick Allen and John Templon. [2] StatsMonkey was created to allow stories based in data, specifically baseball stories at the beginning, to be written automatically by StatsMonkey. These baseball stories would include recaps based on game data like players, win probability and game score. [3] Narrative Science licensed StatsMonkey and the related intellectual property from Northwestern and began commercial operations in early 2010. [4] Afterwards the company decided to change direction, they no longer focused on the journalistic capabilities of their technology and focused on how the same technology could be used in the business world. This led to the development of a Natural Language Generation platform called Quill, which analyzes structured data and automatically generates intelligent narratives for business users who are not data fluent. [5] Narrative Science has several investors, including SAP Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. [6] In 2014, the Chicago company raised another $10 million in equity financing, led by customer USAA, for a total of $32 million raised since the company’s inception. [7] In 2020, Narrative Science launched Data Storytelling for Good, their non-profit branch which provides their products for free to organizations doing good in their community.

In November, 2021, Narrative Science announced an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce. [8] The deal closed on December 17, 2021, and Narrative Science was folded into Tableau. In the announcement of the close, Salesforce indicated that Narrative Science's products would no longer be sold on a stand-alone basis.

Recognition

In 2017, Fortune listed Narrative Science as one of the 50 companies leading the artificial intelligence revolution. [9] In 2015, CNBC named Narrative Science to their Disruptor 50 list. [10]

Gartner named Narrative Science as one of the “Cool Vendors in Smart Machines” in 2014. [11]

In 2013, the company was named to the Red Herring Top 100 for North America, [12] which highlights promising startups in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Narrative Science won a 2013 Edison Award for Innovative Services in Collaboration and Knowledge Management. [13] [14]

In 2018, Narrative Science was part of the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers. [15]

In 2018, Narrative Science was named Most Innovative Company by Crain's Chicago Business . [16]

Competitors

According to Gartner's 2019 "Market Guide for NLG", the main NLG companies are (in alphabetical order): Arria NLG, Automated Insights, AX Semantics, Narrative Science, vPhrase and Yseop. [17] Other similar companies in the area of natural language generation include Smartologic, Retresco, United Robots and Linguastat.

Criticism

The company received some early criticism from journalists speculating that Narrative Science was attempting to eliminate the jobs of writers, particularly in sports and finance. [18] [19] [20] [21] Critics also argue that biases and assumptions in original data sets can lead to reinforced bias in the stories generated by natural language processors, [22] such as Narrative Science. [22] A CBS article compared artificially generated journalism in the financial sector to the property market bubble, as it leads to “everyone making investments in the same way for the same reasons”. [22] The article claimed that computer-generated narratives have the “potential to amplify biases and assumptions, but at far greater speed and on a far wider scale than anything written by humans.” [22]

An article from the Columbia Journalism School also criticized the limitations of “robo-journalism” software, as “it can’t assess the damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story” and therefore, lacks a necessary human element. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. A widely-cited survey of NLG methods describes NLG as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that is concerned with the construction of computer systems than can produce understandable texts in English or other human languages from some underlying non-linguistic representation of information".

The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation is an American company that provides commercial data, analytics, and insights for businesses. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, the company offers a wide range of products and services for risk and financial analysis, operations and supply, and sales and marketing professionals, as well as research and insights on global business issues. It serves customers in government and industries such as communications, technology, strategic financial services, and retail, telecommunications, and manufacturing markets. Often referred to as D&B, the company's database contains over 500 million business records worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exelon</span> American utility company

Exelon Corporation is a public utility headquartered in Chicago, and incorporated in Pennsylvania. Exelon is the largest electric parent company in the United States by revenue and is the largest regulated electric utility in the United States with approximately 10 million customers. The company is ranked 99th on the Fortune 500.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stats Perform</span> US sports technology and data company

Stats Perform is a sports AI company formed through the combination of Stats and Perform.

Tableau Software, LLC is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence. It was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019, the company was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion. At the time, this was the largest acquisition by Salesforce since its foundation. It was later surpassed by Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.

Document Structuring is a subtask of Natural language generation, which involves deciding the order and grouping of sentences in a generated text. It is closely related to the Content determination NLG task.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sumo Logic</span> U.S. information technology company

Sumo Logic, Inc. is a cloud-based machine data analytics company focusing on security, operations and BI use-cases. It provides log management and analytics services that use machine-generated big data. Sumo Logic was founded in April 2010 by ArcSight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.

LinguaSys, Inc. was a company headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. LinguaSys provided multilingual human language software and services to financial, banking, hospitality, Customer Relations Management, technology, forensics and telecommunications blue chip enterprises, and the government and military.

Andrew Perlman is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded nine venture-backed companies in the telecom, high-tech, pharmaceuticals, energy, water, and biotechnology industries. He is currently General Partner of GreatPoint Ventures, and the former chairman and CEO of GreatPoint Energy, a company based in Chicago, Illinois which develops technology to produce clean natural gas from coal. Perlman has been featured on the MIT Technology Review’s list of the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35 and Crain’s Chicago Business’s list of 40 leaders under 40 in Chicago. Perlman and GreatPoint Energy have been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Forbes, and Fast Company.

Christopher Bouton is the founder and CEO of Entagen, a software company in the Boston, Massachusetts area, which develops Big Data integration and analytics solutions. Entagen's technologies were named "Innovative Technology of the Year in Big Data" in 2012 by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and Entagen was named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in the Life Sciences in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Automated Insights</span>

Automated Insights (AI) is an American-based technology company that specializes in natural language generation (NLG) software that turns big data into readable narratives.

Yseop is a French software company, specializing in no code intelligent report automation, using natural language generation (NLG). Established in 2000 with offices in Paris, New York, Lyon and Bogota. Yseop was a pioneer in NLG which laid the groundwork for Chat GPT and Generative AI. Yseop's original founding team sold their stake in the company to Next Stage, a French Private Equity Company.

Alteryx, Inc. is an American computer software company based in Irvine, California, with a development center in Broomfield, Colorado, and offices worldwide. The company's products are used for data science and analytics. The software is designed to make advanced analytics automation accessible to any data worker.

Arria NLG plc is a New Zealand-based company with headquarters in the US. Arria offers artificial intelligence technology in data analytics and information delivery. It is one of the companies in the space of automatic text generation, with a focus on Natural Language Generation (NLG). When it floated on London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in December 2013, it was valued at over £160 million. However, Arria was later delisted from the stock exchange. Subsequently, Arria has raised over US$100 million from private sources. Arria's technology is based on three decades of scientific research in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lingotek</span> Cloud-based translations service provider

Lingotek is a cloud-based translation services provider, offering translation management software and professional linguistic services for web content, software platforms, product documentation and electronic documents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G2 Crowd</span> Peer-to-peer review site

G2.com, formerly G2 Crowd, is a peer-to-peer review site headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It was known as G2 Labs, Inc. until 2013. The company was launched in May 2012 by former BigMachines employees, with a focus on aggregating user reviews for business software.

Augmented Analytics is an approach of data analytics that employs the use of machine learning and natural language processing to automate analysis processes normally done by a specialist or data scientist. The term was introduced in 2017 by Rita Sallam, Cindi Howson, and Carlie Idoine in a Gartner research paper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alation</span> American software company

Alation is a venture-backed, B2B enterprise software company based in Silicon Valley. Its solutions are focused on data catalog, analytics, and data management.

References

  1. ↑ "Partner Community". partners.salesforce.com. Retrieved 2022-11-06.
  2. 1 2 "Stats Monkey". Intelligent Information Laboratory. Northwestern University. Archived from the original on 16 November 2010. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  3. ↑ "Program Creates Computer-Generated Sports Stories". NPR. NPR. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  4. ↑ Bachman, Justin. "Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?". Business Week. Business Week. Archived from the original on May 3, 2010. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  5. ↑ Woodie, Alex. "Your Big Data Will Read to you Now". Datanami. Tabor Publications. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  6. ↑ Diakopoulos, Nicholas. "Automated Stories: Using Algorithms to Craft News Content". Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Columbia Journalism School. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  7. ↑ Pletz, John. "Narrative Science gets $11.5 million to write next chapter". Crain's Chicago Business. Crain's. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  8. ↑ "Narrative Science signs agreement to be acquired by Salesforce | Narrative Science". 2021-11-15. Archived from the original on 2021-11-15. Retrieved 2022-11-06.
  9. ↑ Rapp, Brian O'Keefe, Nicolas. "50 Companies Leading the Artificial Intelligence Revolution". Fortune. Retrieved 2017-06-17.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. ↑ staff, CNBC com (2015-05-12). "Narrative Science 2015 Disruptor 50" . Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  11. ↑ Austin, Tom; Linden, Alexander; Rozwell, Carol; Brant, Kenneth; Ghubril, Adib; Anurag, Gupta. "Cool Vendors in Smart Machines, 2014". Gartner. Gartner, Inc. Retrieved 17 June 2014.[ dead link ]
  12. ↑ "2013 Top 100 North America: Winners". Red Herring. Red Herring, Inc. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
  13. ↑ "2013 Edison Award Winners". Edison Awards. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
  14. ↑ "2013 Edison Awards Announced for Innovative Products and Services". Business Wire . April 26, 2013. Retrieved March 15, 2024.
  15. ↑ "Introducing the Technology Pioneers Cohort of 2018". widgets.weforum.org. Retrieved 2018-12-27.
  16. ↑ "Meet Chicago's Most innovative companies in 2018". Crain's Chicago Business. Retrieved 2018-12-27.
  17. ↑ "Market Guide for Natural Language Generation Platforms". Gartner. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  18. ↑ Clark, Patrick. "Can an Algorithm Replace Stock Analysts?". Business Week. Business Week. Archived from the original on July 13, 2013. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  19. ↑ Levy, Steven. "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?". Wired. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  20. ↑ Fassler, Joe. "Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?". The Atlantic. The Atlantic. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  21. ↑ Hamburger, Ellis. "Robo-journalists are already writing the next generation of news stories". The Verge. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  22. 1 2 3 4 Hefferman, Margaret. "The post was written by a human". CBS News. CBS. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
  23. ↑ Howard, Alexander. "The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism" (PDF). Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Columbia Journalism School. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.