Make Way for Natural Language Generation

Narrative Science has turned its Quill software loose on producing investment reports for companies like Nuveen and American Century Investments, churning out personalized written reports for individual members' portfolios at USAA, and generating web analytics and search engine optimization content for a global leader of local commerce.

I spoke with several companies about their work with Narrative Science and Quill. They felt that the tools were effective at producing customized narratives. One, a company called Zotec Partners that uses Quill for medical billing reports, is tapping what I believe will be a big category for NLG. There has been a rush to visual analytics over the past several years, but digesting data in visual form can be difficult and time-consuming. Zotec has found that doctors running medical practices appreciate a short verbal summary of their billing performance. 

Another user advancing this technology is Craig Muraskin, an Innovation leader at Deloitte, where I work as a senior advisor (but not with Muraskin’s group). Muraskin said Deloitte is working with Narrative Science, (see this whitepaper) to weave Quill into some of its systems related to analytics, business intelligence and case management.  Quill could enhance or even replace the reporting layer in these systems and can even write explanations that help users better understand dashboard analytics and alerts. 

Deloitte is also piloting Quill to write the narrative component of suspicious activity reports (SARs) to assist with anti-money laundering compliance, provide fraudulent activity insights for internal audit teams, and create explanations on the impact that threshold changes and model tuning may have on analytic efforts. Read the article in full »

Thomas H. Davenport is a world-renowned thought leader and author, is a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, Director of Research at the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.

Note: Don't be surprised about the machine language. Research has gone quite a few steps ahead that what was 2 years back. One of such example is WORDAI. Th latest version is pretty amazingly rewrites using such natural language processing algorithm.