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Sell-Bot: An Intelligent Tool for Advertisement Synthesis on Social Media

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The Disruptive Fourth Industrial Revolution

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 674))

Abstract

Social Media Advertising is one of the fastest ways to reach a large group of targeted customers. In the present day, there are large volumes of advertisement campaigns designed for, and running on Social Media Platforms, yielding significant conversion rates for businesses. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have offered new techniques for tailoring advertisements towards targeted audiences. Some of these techniques include Machine Learning (ML) applications in the analysis of Big Data; acquired from customers spending, and/or buying patterns. Hence, software companies and researchers have created several tools that target specific customers in need of specific products and services. An aspect of AI that has not seen too many applications in Advertising is Natural Language Generation (NLG); the study of algorithms for generating natural or human languages. In this chapter, we present a NLG algorithm for the automatic generation of advertisements for Social Media platforms. This algorithm is implemented in a tool called Sell-Bot that is based on Context-free Grammars; a formal technique for describing or generating languages. This algorithm takes a list of available and currently discounted commercial products and services of an organisation, and intelligently composes a valid Social Media post (a tweet or Facebook post) that is often indistinguishable from a human expert marketer’s tweet or post. An evaluation of Sell-Bot showed that 42% of the participants did not know whether the AI (Sell-Bot) or the human generated the adverts. Sell-Bot is expected to relieve humans of their efforts of posting advertisements on Social Media.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Natural Language.

  2. 2.

    Turing Test: Used to determine whether a machine can think like a human-being (Luger 2005).

  3. 3.

    Business Intelligence.

  4. 4.

    Key Performance Indicator.

  5. 5.

    Structured Query Language.

  6. 6.

    Tree-Adjoining Grammar.

  7. 7.

    Sentence Planning Using Descriptions.

  8. 8.

    The special name is the theme of the promotion, this could be related to an event or weather season.

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Acknowledgements

This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Grant Number: 119041). Any Opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of authors and therefor the NRF does not accept liability in regard thereto. The second author acknowledges his Research Assistant, Nikita Patel, for her contribution in drawing the rich pictures in this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Formal Structures Algorithms and Industrial Applications Research Cluster, Department of Applied Information Systems, School of Consumer Intelligence and Information Systems, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park Bunting Road Campus, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Sonny Kabaso & Abejide Ade-Ibijola

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  1. Sonny Kabaso
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  2. Abejide Ade-Ibijola
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Correspondence to Abejide Ade-Ibijola .

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  1. Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

    Wesley Doorsamy

  2. Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

    Babu Sena Paul

  3. University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

    Tshilidzi Marwala

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Kabaso, S., Ade-Ibijola, A. (2020). Sell-Bot: An Intelligent Tool for Advertisement Synthesis on Social Media. In: Doorsamy, W., Paul, B., Marwala, T. (eds) The Disruptive Fourth Industrial Revolution. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 674. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48230-5_7

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