Green, Matthew James

Mellish, Christopher Stuart

Siddharthan, Advaith

van Deemter, Kees

Van Der Wal, Rene

English

Aberdeen University Research

Blogging birds: Generating narratives about reintroduced species topromote public engagementAdvaith Siddharthan, Matthew Green, Kees van Deemter, Chris Mellish & Rene´ van der Wal{advaith, mjgreen, k.vdeemter, c.mellish, r.vanderwal}@abdn.ac.ukUniversity of AberdeenAbstractThis paper proposes the use of NLG to en-hance public engagement during the course ofspecies reintroductions. We examine whetherecological insights can be effectively commu-nicated through blogs about satellite-taggedindividuals, and whether such blogs can helpcreate a positive perception of the species inreaders’ minds, a requirement for successfulreintroduction. We then discuss the impli-cations for NLG systems that generate blogsfrom satellite-tag data.1 IntroductionConservation of wildlife is an objective to whichconsiderable effort is devoted by governments andNGOs across the world. A variety of web-basedapproaches can help make the natural world moreaccessible to the public, which in turn may trans-late into greater public support for nature conserva-tion initiatives. The present paper explores the roleof Natural Language Generation (NLG) in bringingup-to-date information about wild animals in theirnatural environment to nature enthusiasts.We focus on the reintroduction of the red kiteto the UK. This member of the raptor family wasonce widespread in the UK, but prolonged and in-tense persecution led to its near extinction. Since1989, efforts have been ongoing to reintroduce thisspecies in various locations across the country. Weare working together with one of the largest na-ture conservation charities in Europe to use NLGfor public engagement around a small number ofsatellite-tagged reintroduced red kites.The public engagement activities surrounding thisreintroduction initiative have two subtly differentobjectives: (i) to communicate ecological insights toincrease awareness about the species, and (ii) to cre-ate a positive image of the reintroduced species toharness public support for the reintroduction. Cur-rently, data from these satellite tags are being usedby the charity to manually create blogs such as:...Ruby (Carrbridge) had an interesting flightdown to Loch Duntelchaig via Dochfour onthe 6th March before flying back to theDrumsmittal area, spending the 10th March inthe Loch Ussie area (possibly also attracted bythe feeding potential there!) and then back toDrumsmittal for the 13th...Such blogs are used by schools which haveadopted individual kites, and pupils can read thesetexts alongside a map plotting the GPS locations of‘their’ kite. As can already be seen from the above,there is currently little ecological information aboutthe species in these blogs. Because of the perceivedimportance of education to the success of reintro-ductions, there is a clear desire to include more eco-logical insights. Yet, time and resource limitationshave prevented the charity from doing so; they per-ceive the writing of such blogs already as very timeconsuming, and indeed, rather mundane.In this paper, we explore the use of blogs based onsatellite tag data for communicating ecological in-sights and creating a positive image of a species. Weconsider both aspects, deemed essential for a suc-cessful species reintroduction, and focus on how theblogs can be made more informative than those cur-rently being written by the charity.2 Related workData-to-text systems (e.g., Goldberg et al. (1994);Theune et al. (2001); Portet et al. (2009)) have typ-(a) (b)Figure 1: Plot of (a) distance from nest as a function of time, and (b) clusters of visited locations.ically been used to generate summaries of technicaldata for professionals, such as engineers, nurses andoil rig workers. There is some work on the use ofdata-to-text for lay audiences; e.g., generating nar-ratives from sensor data for automotive (Reddingtonet al., 2011) and environmental (Molina et al., 2011)applications, generating personal narratives to helpchildren with complex communication needs (Blacket al., 2010), and summarising neonatal intensivecare data for parents (Mahamood et al., 2008).Our application differs from the above-mentioneddata-to-text applications, in that we aim to gener-ate inspiring as well as informative texts. It bearssome resemblance to NLG systems that offer “info-tainment”, such as Dial Your Disc (Van Deemter andOdijk, 1997) and Ilex (O’Donnell et al., 2001). Infact, Dial Your Disc, which generates spoken mono-logues about classical music, focused emphaticallyon generating engaging texts, and achieved linguis-tic variation through the use of recursive, syntacti-cally structured templates (see also, Theune et al.(2001)). We intend to extend a data-to-text systemin similar ways, using ecological insights to makenarratives engaging for non-experts.3 Overall GoalsOur overall aim is to bring satellite tagged animals(in this case study, red kites) “to life” by construct-ing narratives around their patterns of movement.We require individual locations of a bird to be ex-plained in the context of its wider spatial use, andthe ecological interpretations thereof. This paper hasthe following goals:1. To illustrate how satellite tag data can be analysed toidentify behavioural patterns for use in generatingblogs (content selection);2. To test whether blogs written by an ecologist basedon such data analysis can be used to educate as wellas create a positive perception of the species;3. To investigate the challenges for NLG in automat-ing the generation of such blogs.4 Data analysis for identifying behavioursFrom an NLG perspective, our interest in automat-ing the generation of blogs from satellite tag datais in making these narratives more interesting, byusing the data to illustrate key aspects of red kitebehaviour. To illustrate how we can relate the datato behaviours, we provide two graphical views ofGPS fixes from a tagged red kite. Fig. 1(a) showshow far a focal kite is located from its nest over thecourse of a year. We propose to use such data to con-struct narratives around ecological insights regard-ing the exploratory behaviours of red kites duringtheir first year after fledgling. Fig. 1(b) shows thesame GPS data, but now spatially, thereby plottinglatitude against longitude of all fixes without regardto time. This portrayal highlights the kite’s favouredlocations (indicated in different colours based on aMATLAB cluster analysis which automatically esti-mates the parameters of a Gaussian mixture model,even when clusters overlap substantially), as well asits broad range.These plots illustrate two key aspects of kite be-haviour: exploration and site-fidelity (the presenceof favoured locations that the kite tends to return to).In addition, we are interested in communicating var-ious feeding behaviours as well as that, unlike manyother birds of prey, red kites are social birds, oftenfound in groups. Feeding and social behaviours can-not be directly identified from the data. However,they can often be inferred; for instance, a red kitespending its time by the side of a main road is likelyto be looking to scavenge on road kill.5 Study on engaging readers using blogsWe now report a study that explores whether suchecological insights can be effectively communicatedthrough blogs constructed around an individual ofthe species, and whether such blogs can help create apositive perception of the species in a reader’s mind.This study was based on a text manually con-structed by an ecologist based on five weeks ofdata such as in Fig 1 from a red kite named “RedBaroness”. For this study, the data was mapped ontoa simplified world with seven features: a lake, ashoreline, fields, a road, a moor, a forest and a river.A sample of the text is shown in Figure 2 for illus-tration.Week 2: How different the pattern of movementsof Red Baroness was this week! On Monday, sheshot off past Bleak Moor, on her longest journeyso far north-east of the lake. She appeared not tofind much of interest there, and on the next dayshe was observed combing the edges of GreenPark, possibly in search of a group of birds rest-ing in the top half of the trees. The bird wasclearly restless however, as on Thursday she wasobserved following River Rapid, downstream forfurther than she had been last month, finally stop-ping when she reached Blue Lake again.Figure 2: Sample material showing week 2 from the fiveweek blog5.1 Experimental Design80 participants were shown the material: a five weekblog on the movements of the focal red kite, namedRed Baroness, alongside a picture of a red kite and aschematic map marking the seven features of inter-est. Participants were students at the University ofAberdeen. The experiment was conducted in a lab ina supervised setting. After reading and returning theblog, each participant was asked to (a) summarisethe blog they had just read in 5 lines, (b) state whatthey found most interesting, and (c) state what theydid not like about the blog. These textual responseswere manually coded for whether the four behaviourtypes (site fidelity, exploration, feeding and social)were identified by each participant.To gauge the participants’ perceptions of the kite,we used two methods. First, we asked the participantto answer four questions that tested various aspectsof their willingness to engage with red kite conser-vation:Q1 Would you be willing to contribute money to a char-ity that tries to protect kites?Q2 The use of rat poison also leads to the death of kitesthat feed on the bodies of these rats. Would you bewilling to sign a campaign against rat poison?Q3 Should governments allocate more money than theydo currently to protect kites from extinction?Q4 Write your email if you wish to be sent more blogs.Further to this, participants were asked to assessthe red kite’s personality. We follow (Gosling et al.,2003), who use the 44 question Big Five Inventory(BFI) (John et al., 1991; John et al., 2008) to as-sess the personality of dogs. We are interested inwhether readers did assign personalities to the redkite in the blog and, if so, what these personalityprofiles looked like.5.2 ResultsWe now analyse the extent to which our participantswere informed about red kite ecology as well as howwilling they were to engage with conservation ef-forts and how they perceived the species.5.2.1 InformativenessMore than half the participants identified feed-ing behaviour (61%) and social (54%) behaviour.The other two ecological concepts were not men-tioned explicitly in the blog that participants read,but needed to be inferred. Around a quarter of par-ticipants managed to infer the notion of site fidelity(23%), the most difficult of the concepts, and 41%inferred exploratory behaviour.5.2.2 Engagement39% provided their email address to receive fur-ther blogs (the only real commitment), and an equalnumber expressed willingness to contribute moneyfor red kite conservation efforts. 85% expressedwillingness to sign a campaign against rat poisoning,and 61% wanted increased government spending forred kite conservation.We detected a correlation between re-call/inference of behaviours and willingness toengage (plotting total number of behaviours re-called/inferred by each participant against the totalnumber of engagement questions answered affirma-tively, rpearson = 0.31; p < 0.005; n = 80). Oneinterpretation of this result is that greater insightsinto the life of this bird has positively influencedthe reader’s perceptions of it. Further qualitativestudies are needed to substantiate this, but we viewthis result as evidence in favour of incorporatingecological insights into the blogs.5.2.3 PerceptionTable 1 shows the big five personality traits as-signed to Red Baroness by participants. The BFI isconstructed such that being non-committal about the44 trait questions would result in scores of 3. Theability of readers to assign human personality traits(significantly different from 3.0) to the red kite indi-cates a willingness to anthromorphise the bird. Thelast column shows the average personality of 21 yearold humans (from Srivastava et al. (2003)), which isthe same age group as our participants. The valuesfor extroversion, agreeableness and conscientious-ness are very similar, and the kite has lower neu-roticism and openness.6 Implications for NLGThe above study indicates that it is possible to usenarratives based on satellite tag data to communi-cate ecological insights as well as create a positiveperception of the species in the readers’ minds. Togenerate texts that are fluent and engaging enoughthat readers will be both informed and entertainedby them poses challenges that are sharply differ-ent from the ones facing most data-to-text systems,Trait Red Kite Conf. Int. 21 yoExtroversion 3.28 3.07–3.48 3.25Agreeableness 3.64 3.47–3.80 3.64Conscientiousness 3.48 3.26–3.69 3.45Neuroticism 2.60 2.41–2.80 3.32Openness 3.29 3.11–3.47 3.92Table 1: Big five personality traits of Red Baroness with99.9% confidence intervals, compared to average 21 yearolds (6076 people) (Srivastava et al., 2003)whose primary purpose is to offer decision support.Our goals are more similar to those of Dial YourDisc (Van Deemter and Odijk, 1997), with the addedrequirement that texts should be easy to read. Forinstance, ecological concepts (such as site fidelity)could be communicated by explicitly defining them.However, we would prefer these to be inferred frommore engaging narratives.The blogs currently created by the charity (cf.Section 1) are, stripped down to their essence, a se-quence of locations. We propose to interlay thesesequences of locations with descriptions of red kitebehaviours, broadly categorised as fidelity, explo-ration, feeding or social. Algorithm 1 outlines theplanning process. We have developed an initial pro-totype that implements this for our simplified world.Using template based generation, we can automati-cally generate blogs such as the following for arbi-trary sequences of locations in our simplified world:This week Red Baroness continued to feel likestretching her wings. On Monday she wasseen in the fields by the lake, calling out toother kites. On Tuesday and Wednesday shestayed along the road, looking for roadkill onthe country lanes. On Thursday she returnedto the fields by the lake – clearly there wasplenty to eat there.To scale this up to the real world, work is inprogress to augment our data analysis component byusing a variety of GIS data to map geo-coordinatesto habitat, terrain and demographic features fromwhich we can identify relevant kite behaviours.Our remaining challenges are to (a) compile alarge list of red kite behaviours, (b) use paraphras-ing approaches to create variety in descriptions ofbehaviour and (c) develop means to interweave more1. Identify place names of interest to the user amongthe many GIS locations frequented by the red kite2. For each place of interest (ordered by time):(a) describe place in terms of relevant geographi-cal features(b) describe one or two behaviours (feeding or so-cial) associated with any of these features(c) make a reference to any exploratory behaviouror site fidelity if identified from previous se-quence.Algorithm 1: Generate a blog about a red kitecomplex behaviours, such as mating, into the narra-tives. There is ongoing interdisciplinary work intoeach of the above. Variation is likely to be critical tothe endeavour as these blogs are aimed at engagingthe reader, not just at presenting information. Thiscan be achieved both by expanding the range of be-haviours we describe, and the range of ways we canrealise these through language.7 ConclusionsThis paper reports a study that informs the appli-cation of NLG technologies to conservation effortscentred around public engagement. We report onfindings which indicate that it is possible to use nar-ratives loosely based on satellite tag data to com-municate ecological insights as well as to create apositive perception of the species in readers’ minds.This informs an approach to automating the creationof blogs from satellite-tagged red kites by interleav-ing sequences of locations with descriptions of be-haviour. A proof of concept system has been devel-oped for a simplified world, and is in the process ofbeing scaled up to the real world, using GIS data.AcknowledgmentsThis research is supported by an award made bythe RCUK Digital Economy programme to thedot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference:EP/G066051/1.ReferencesR. Black, J. Reddington, E. Reiter, N. Tintarev, andA. Waller. 2010. Using nlg and sensors to supportpersonal narrative for children with complex commu-nication needs. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT2010 Workshop on Speech and Language Processingfor Assistive Technologies, pages 1–9. 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Context modeling and the generation of spoken discourse.

Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Setlikeplasterorpersistentchange?.

From data to speech: a general approach.

Blogging birds : Generating narratives about reintroduced species to promote public engagement

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.362.900

Blogging birds : Generating narratives about reintroduced species to promote public engagement

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