Reactive content selection in the generation of real-time soccer commentary

MIKE is an automatic commentary system that generates a commentary of a simulated soccer game in English, French, or Japanese.One of the major technical challenges involved in live sports commentary is the reactive selection of content to describe complex, rapidly unfolding situation. To address this challenge, MIKE employs importance scores that intuitively capture the amount of information communicated to the audience. We describe how a principle of maximizing the total gain of importance scores during a game can be used to incorporate content selection into the surface generation module, thus accounting for issues such as interruption and abbreviation.Sample commentaries produced by MIKE are presented and used to evaluate different methods for content selection and generation in terms of efficiency of communication.