Automated football match reports as models of textuality

Abstract

This paper deals with automated football match reports as a common genre of automated journalism. Based on a corpus of automated and human-written reports (n = 1,302) on the same set of matches and with reference to linguistic concepts of text and textuality, the textual properties of these texts are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis is based on the idea that the task of text generation can be described as the task of automatically selecting cues of textuality such as connectives or signals of thematic relatedness. The results show that automated and human-written texts differ significantly in the use of these cues, particularly in the use of linguistic means for creating evaluation and contrast, and thus allow to trace in detail, how these cues contribute to cohesion, coherence and narrative qualities. Different from computational linguistic approaches focused on optimizing text generation algorithms, this paper proposes to use automated texts, which are to some extent imperfect, as models of textuality that through their imperfection can say something about the nature of texts in general. The paper thus contributes to the field of (mostly communication studies) research on automated journalism in which the texts themselves are rarely investigated.