Ekstra Bladet is among the most well-known and successful Danish tabloid newspapers. One of its special features is that Ekstrabladet.dk states that it is the Danish website with the highest number of daily users.
In this interview, Tore Rich, Content Automation Manager at Ekstra Bladet, talks about his experiences with AX Semantics' platform for automatic content generation.
How do you use the software for automated content generation?
We are using AX Semantics for automated generation of local news articles.
With the PHP framework Laravel, I developed MAGNA, a software pipeline for monitoring the automated generation of news articles. MAGNA monitors and retrieves data from various APIs for analysis. MAGNA then pushes the data to AX Semantics. The data is then transformed into articles through automated content generation, the so called Natural Language Generation (NLG), and afterwards published on Ekstrabladet.dk.
In this way, a wide variety of articles have been generated. These include articles about company closings, real estate sales, weather reports, train delays and news about traffic jams, construction sites or accidents.
Several of these articles also contain charts which also have been generated using AX Semantics.
What is the total number of generated content and how much more do you plan to generate?
All in all, we generated over 200,000 automated texts in 6 months.
Here are the approximate figures from the time frame of September 2021 to February 2022:
- Train traffic reports: 100,000
- Road traffic reports: 63,000
- Weather updates: 30,000
- Company financial statement reports: 5,000
- Real estate sales: 2,000
- Total: 200,000
The amount of content we are going to generate in the future is unlimited and thus impossible to be estimated.
Which particular challenge did you face that you were able to solve with AX Semantics software?
Before we started using AX Semantics, one challenge we faced was structured writing. AX Semantics tool provides a great graphical and clear overview on the rules of content creation, thereby making the writing process much easier in terms of text structuring.
What are your goals in this regard?
We aim to create clear and well elaborated rules for content creation and to produce high-quality articles.
Do you already see results from the use of automated content?
We realized how much news in journalism are written on the basis of changing data. Moreover, we have realized that these news can be generated completely automated.
Ekstrabladet.dk is thus not only experiencing relief from the automatically generated content. It is also a satisfaction for us to know that the users like to read it at the same time.
Which are your plans for the future ?
For the future, we want to create articles with even more relevance for our readers in an even wider range of fields.
For someone who doesn't know the tool yet, how would you describe AX Semantics' software in one sentence?
AX Semantics software is an amazing tool that simplifies the automatic generation of content based on rules and data.