Commentary Generation from Data Records of Multiplayer Strategy Esports Game
This addresses the lack of text commentaries for esports audiences, enabling better retrieval and understanding of plays, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of generating game commentaries from structured data records in esports, specifically using League of Legends, by building a large-scale dataset and evaluating Transformer-based models, revealing challenges in this novel task.
Esports, a sports competition on video games, has become one of the most important sporting events. Although esports play logs have been accumulated, only a small portion of them accompany text commentaries for the audience to retrieve and understand the plays. In this study, we therefore introduce the task of generating game commentaries from esports' data records. We first build large-scale esports data-to-text datasets that pair structured data and commentaries from a popular esports game, League of Legends. We then evaluate Transformer-based models to generate game commentaries from structured data records, while examining the impact of the pre-trained language models. Evaluation results on our dataset revealed the challenges of this novel task. We will release our dataset to boost potential research in the data-to-text generation community.