NLG for Financial Services: Narrativa and WSJ’s success story

We bring you Narrativa and WSJ’s success story: NLG for Financial Services. In January we announced the collaboration between Narrativa and The Wall Street Journal, one of the most influential newspapers in the world, when they began generating financial news through our Natural Language Generation (NLG) platform. This is how we started to create narratives with the most important data from the financial markets both in Europe and the United States.

Alyssa Zeisler, R&D editor at The Wall Street Journal, recently revealed on Medium how they use our artificial intelligence system and the benefits this brings to their digital strategy.

Here is a summary of the article explaining how WSJ uses our natural language generation system: NLG for Financial Services: Narrativa and WSJ’s ‘success story’.

AI focuses on the ‘what’, journalists on the ‘why’ 

The Wall Street Journal was looking to improve the experience of its readers and Narrativa was offering the perfect solution. WSJ uses the Draft Assistant, a real-time article generator that uses natural language processing to create a first draft.

Text is based on language derived from WSJ articles and their data API, resulting in a writing style that doesn’t seem strange to the reader. Our NLG platform is charged with extracting the long-used style that receives so much recognition from its readers.

Text is then developed and enriched by WSJ editors, who complete them by adding an overall analysis. The result could not be better; articles generated by Narrativa are on the front page of the American newspaper.

Narrativa generates two types of news for The Wall Street Journal:

• Information on the state of financial markets in the United States, Europe and Asia.
• The consumer price index and producer price index (CPI and PPI).

It is a perfect solution to relieve workload, allowing journalists to be more productive and efficient without having to spend hours and hours on tasks that can be easily automated. As Alyssa says, “the computer focuses on the ‘what’ so that editors can focus on the ‘why’.”

AI, the journalist’s best ally

Journalists end up being able to combine analysis with their own knowledge and can get their story in front of their readers much more quickly. Our artificial intelligence system gives WSJ journalists the information on stock markets immediately, and they can then analyze the consequences for the financial world.

Both contributions are recognized in the article, with a byline at the end of the piece citing the journalist’s name alongside an additional note reading “An artificial-intelligence tool was used in the creation of this article.“

This tool does not act as a replacement for editors, on the contrary; artificial intelligence is a perfect ally to be able to better develop their work, using a combination of technology and research.

The generation of automatic news lets us know what is happening in any stock market around the world without having to analyze millions of data points, which can sometimes result in us missing the most crucial information.

Narrativa

When we founded Narrativa in 2015, we always had great things in mind. We believe in the transformative power of artificial intelligence; it is a disruptive technology that allows us to change the status quo. We have nothing to fear from machines, but rather we can use them to build a better world.

For Narrativa, it is an honor to work with an organization like The Wall Street Journal, which employs some of the world’s best journalists.

In addition, we can generate automatic content for any field of knowledge: economics, health, science, sport… We can create 3,000 mobile descriptions in seconds or generate a clinical paper in two simple steps.

No matter what sector you do business in, there is always the perfect NLG solution for your  day-to-day business. You can find more information about our services on our website. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.