Humanizing the machine with language: Building the bridge between data and information

It is clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the world in ways that no other set of technologies ever have. Technologies of machine learning, text analysis, recommendation, and natural language processing are all being applied to a wide variety of problems and yet most of us still struggle to understand what their results mean or even the numbers behind them. The numbers alone simply do not provide us with what we really need: Information and insight. The data and the algorithms are only the first step in finding the insights we want and making them useful to the decision makers who need them. In this talk, I will present a set of approaches to connecting humans with the intelligent systems that serve them using the tool that is most natural to us, language. We will look at how Intelligent Narrative Generation can play the crucial role of bridging the gap between the world of numbers and symbols and our need for understandable insights. We will dive into examples from business, education and Law to show how the power of language can provide us all with the insights that are still trapped in the wealth of data we now control.