Automated journalism articles: discourse or not?

Abstract

Given the central role of the subject in discourse analysis on the one hand, and the rise of automated journalism on the other, the question arises, “can the outputs of automated journalism be considered discourse?”, for the existence of a clearly defined and unquestionable subject in them is not evident at first sight, and this existence is for discourse analysis an indispensable requisite of discourse. In order to answer this question, the literature related to the expression of subjectivity in discourse is reviewed and then contrasted with a brief review of the literature related to the nature and features of automated journalism outputs. The first review allows the decomposition of the concept of subjectivity into a series of elements, while the contrast with the second one allows the determination of the presence or absence of these subjectivity components in the automated journalism outputs. Therefore, the question is answered and future research is suggested.