Spanking the Stats Monkey

What has the European press riled up today? McDonald’s on the Champs-Elysées? The rumors that Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni are having separate affairs? No, it’s Stats Monkey, a program developed by the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University that can crank out an article about a baseball game without using a human writer.

“The system is based on two underlying technologies. First, it uses baseball statistical models to figure out what the news is in the story: By analyzing changes in Win Probability and Game Scores, the system can pick out the key plays and players from any baseball game. Second, the system includes a library of narrative arcs that describe the main dynamics of baseball games (as well as many other competitions): Was it a come-from-behind win? Back-and-forth the whole way? Did one team jump out in front at the beginning and then sit on its lead? The system uses a decision tree to select the appropriate narrative arc. This then determines the main components of the game story and enables the system to put them together in a cohesive and compelling manner. The stories can be generated from the point of view of either team,” reads the information at Stats Monkey website.

France’s Le Monde is calling it the “the era of robot-journalists” – according to Google’s computer-generated translation.

The big question is: As a baseball writer, will Stats Monkey let Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds into the Hall of Fame?