Quill is an automated narrative generation platform for the enterprise that creates perfectly written narratives to convey meaning for any intended audience. It was invented by Chicago based tech firm Narrative Science.
“So, how does Quill work in the world of social media, where “data” is unstructured text? What can a system that lives and breathes structured data do with language that can be sophisticated, ambiguous and messy?”
Twitter proved to be a viable source of such unstructured data. Narrative Science utilised Quill to provide tweeters – from causal tweeters to “VITs” (Very Important Tweeters) – with their personal stories, which includes information about their sphere of influence they can act on.
“We quickly realised that a small amount of work would allow us to extract enough data from the texts we were processing to generate a story. In other words, we could do for Quill what Quill does for others – give it the information in a form most natural for it – structured data – so that it could provide us with the information in a form most natural for us – plain English language,” explains a news release about the problem of machine not understanding the massive data available on the social networking site.
“We decided to look at a mass of tweets and pull out two main data points for each one: the general topic area (e.g., politics, education, business, technology, etc.) and a sentiment score associated with the tweet (positive or negative),” it further says.
Narrative Science created a public application called QuillConnect, for people to use as the stories Quill generated were “interesting and actionable.” The stories generated by Quill Connect focus on how you and your followers are similar, how you are different and how to better engage with your followers.
Narrative Science believes it to be milestone; firstly because Quill can generate narratives using social media data and secondly, the ease of accessibility of personalized Twitter story that provides useful information about their influence and their followers.
Try QuillConnect for yourself here.
(Image credit: Luis Vidal)
