5. 1, 3. 8; p = 0.0233, 0.0499). The absence of ecological interpretation by the baseline system was thus judged adversely for all movement patterns, particularly so when the birds were relatively static. We also found the full blogs were rated as more informative (p<0.0001) and more engaging (p=0.0215) but not more fluent (p=0.825) (see Figure 8), confirming hypothesis H5.

The two studies we have presented here demonstrate that computer-generated blogs are appraised more positively than human-written blogs, and that computer-generated blogs with creatively generated ecological insights are preferred overwhelmingly to blogs generated from the same data but without inclusion of these insights.

Conclusion

The Blogging Birds system shows that raw satellite tag data can be transformed into fluent, engaging, and informative texts directed at members of the public and in support of nature conservation.

We demonstrated that computers can compete with human experts in generating creative stories from numerical data. Unlike natural language generation systems that generate texts for news reporting or for decision making in the workplace, Blogging Birds’s narratives are not entirely factual. Though the system is constrained by the observed data and its ecological domain model, the red kites’ reported foraging and social behaviors are only imagined to have taken place. However, including these behaviors in the narratives allows us to communicate red kite ecology to the reader, and the blogs are better appraised as a consequence. Our work thus simultaneously addresses the societal challenges of communicating data effectively and engaging the general public with scientific research.

Blogging Birds composes blogs by
combining texts produced through
three different types of analysis: The
first is a generic factual summariza-
tion of telemetric data enriched with
location-specific information about
weather conditions, habitat type, and
geographic features, and can be read-
ily adapted for use in other domains.
The second is the processing and eco-
logical interpretation of movement
for “informativeness,” thus illustrating
the difficulty of being informative, en-
gaging, and fluent at the same time,
even for a human writer. Indeed, all the
writers were committed and used the
full 1. 5 hours for composing the blogs,
yet most were outperformed by the com-
puter on each of the three metrics. For
examples of human-written and com-
puter-generated blogs, as well as details
of how they were appraised by evalua-
tors, see the online appendix.

A questionnaire filled out by the blog writers provided many interesting insights. In general, they found it difficult to comprehend and summarize the sheer amount of data in fewer than 200 words but also felt the process became easier the more they did. There was, however, concern from many that the blogs were becoming repetitive, especially if there was little variation in what the red kites were actually doing, stemming largely from a lack of knowledge of kite ecology and behavior. Summarizing the range of data in different formats was certainly challenging, and some enjoyed the process more than others. There was considerable variability in how the blog writers used the materials provided them to create the blogs. Some concentrated mostly on the visible patterns on Google maps, others looked in more detail at the map data by clicking on individual map points to find out more, and yet others found inspecting the data in a tabular format was most useful. Asked whether they would like to write the red kite blogs as a job, the consensus was that, although initially enjoyable, it would quickly get tedious and increasingly more difficult to write non-repetitive material.

Evaluation against baseline. Participants demonstrated a conclusive preference for the full system with ecological insights, preferring it in 61 trials compared to only 20 trials in which the baseline was preferred (χ2 = 21. 5; p < 0.001), confirming hypothesis H4. Interestingly, this effect was strongest when blogs described situations with little movement by the birds during those weeks (C1); here, the full-system blogs were preferred in 23 trials compared to just four baseline blogs (χ2 = 13. 4; p=0.0002). For C2 and C3, the corresponding values were preferences for the full system in 20 and 18 trials, compared to preferences for the baseline in eight trials each (χ2 =

Telemetric data
is ubiquitous,
captured by
smartphones
and other mobile
devices, as well
as through GPS
sensors embedded
in vehicles used by
the transportation
industry and others.