My MozCon presentation was a short film created by the iPullRank team.

I’m not going to spoil it because I’d rather you watched it, but the movie is one part “Batman: The Animated Series” and one part “Mr. Robot” presented in a mixed-media format.

If you haven’t seen it, we’ve just released a Director’s Cut as well as all the related resources and code (all the tactics and code are real) from the film, so please have a look. We made it for you!

What I want to highlight today, though, is the scene toward the end of the film wherein the concept of scalable text generation is explored.

Have a look:

In this scene we’re depicting our protagonist, Casey Robins, figuring out how to programmatically generate copy for ecommerce category pages and incorporating data into that copy based on the JSON object used to populate that page.

Yeah, that was a mouthful, but it’s the coolest tactic that I’ve devised in the past five years, so bear with me!

DataToText Is Still Academic, But Here’s a Hack

As I mention in the dialog, there’s a field of Natural Language Generation study called DataToText wherein people are taking structured data and using it to generate copy.

In academic research, engineers have highlighted use cases like giving recaps on sports games and also for generating copy for ecommerce product pages.

Here’s an example of copy generated for a sports game recap from the paper, A hierarchical model for data to text generation.

#digital experience #seo #data analytic