Automating Esports Commentary

Today I learned, via this paper, that people are trying to automatically generate esports commentary.

I had no idea, but I can see how there's an interest for it. The figures from the paper help explain the setup.

You might think this paper is unique, but it sources a whole lot of other papers with related tasks. You can do this for esports, but there's an interest from soccer and basketball too, just like turn based games like chess. For esports, the paper even describes some existing datasets.

Generating sports commentary is interesting because there are many considerations. For starts you'd want the commentary to be correct, but you'd also like to convery strategic depth. You can say that is happening on screen, but you'd also want to analyze what might be going through the players mind.

The paper also mentions training a model with a full description of the architecture, as well as some of it's output.

The paper also mentions some flaws with the current approach::

The hier-archical model was capable of correctly describing the game content in some cases. However, the generated commentaries had limited strategic depth, and they contained hallucination, repetition, and wrong judgement. It was also challenging for the system to generate interesting and intuitive content.

Interesting though!