Narrative Science

History

Narrative Science was founded in 2010 in Evanston, Illinois, after starting at Northwestern University as an academic project in the Intelligent Information Laboratory. 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. StatsMonkey automatically generated news stories on baseball game recaps from applicable baseball game data such as players, game score, and win probability. Narrative Science licensed StatsMonkey and the related intellectual property from Northwestern and began commercial operations in early 2010. Afterwards the company developed a new automated narrative generation platform called Quill, which analyzes structured data and automatically generates narratives. Narrative Science has several investors, including SAP and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. 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.

Quill

Quill is an advanced natural language generation technology powered by artificial intelligence and delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS). Automated narrative generation systems take raw data, determine what the data mean and then generate easy-to-understand descriptions and explanations in natural language. Narrative Science's Chief Scientist Kris Hammond explains the platform’s process as simply “mining data for meaning and insight.” The software uses specific sets of data to answer questions about the state of the world for its user. To date, Quill can only write in English. Customers include American Century Investments, MasterCard and the National Health Service of England.

Quill Engage

In March 2014, Narrative Science launched Quill Engage, a free Google Analytics application that delivers “plain English,” narrative style data analysis reports for website owners. The application analyzes historical data and trends from Google Analytics to create both weekly and monthly reports which are delivered in narrative form. Quill Engage reports key metrics and performance indicators to users, such as content engagement, web traffic and sources, referrals, paid search, and audience segmentation. The technology is powered by Narrative Science's Quill platform.

Narratives for Qlik®

In January 2016, Narrative Science partnered with visual analytics software provider Qlik, to launch Narratives for Qlik, an extension for Qlik Sense desktop and Qlik Sense Enterprise/Server that automatically communicates insights from visualizations into natural language. The narratives are perceptive and dynamic, explaining what is most interesting and important in the data and updating as the user drills down for deeper analysis.

Narratives for Power BI

In April 2016, Narrative Science collaborated with Microsoft to launch a custom visual for advanced data storytelling. Powered by Quill, the seamlessly integrated visual will enable Microsoft Power BI users to gain insight from all of their data - including Salesforce, Github and Adobe Analytics - by transforming it into intelligent narratives. Instead of solely relying on traditional data visualizations for interpretation or analysis explanations, Narratives for Power BI reveals data relationships that extend beyond obvious interpretations.

Recognition

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

In 2013, the company was named to the Red Herring Top 100 for North America, 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.

Competitors

Competing companies in the Narrative Analytics industry include Automated Insights, a firm based in Durham, North Carolina, and Yseop, Inc, a global enterprise company with offices in New York, London and Paris. Other similar companies in the area of natural language generation include Arria NLG, Smartologic, 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. Critics also argue that biases and assumptions in original data sets can lead to reinforced bias in the stories generated by natural language processors, such as Narrative Science. Unlike traditional journalism, however, the computer-generated stories appear to be objective. 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”. 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.”

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.