AI systems may blow weathermen away

September 29, 2005 | Source: NewScientist.com News

Weather forecasters could find themselves pushed out of a job by an artificial intelligence system designed to write clearer, less ambiguous reports.

Computer scientists at the University of Aberdeen, UK, were asked to generate an “artificial weatherperson” by operators of offshore oil rigs, who wanted more clarity in their forecasts. The vocabulary used by different forecasters can be vague and highly variable, says Ehud Reiter, who led the Aberdeen team.

To remove such uncertainties, the team programmed a natural language generation (NLG) software package to transform data on the forecast weather into an unambiguous written bulletin (Artificial Intelligence, vol 167, p 137).

Similar systems could be used to clarify the medical notes of hospital critical care beds to prevent the phrases used to describe a patient’s condition being misinterpreted.