No Time Like the Present: Methods for Generating Colourful and Factual Multilingual News Headlines

News headlines are the main method for briefly providing a summary of the news article and attracting an audience. In this paper, we experiment with different existing methods for producing colourful expressions and news headlines computationally, in a practical setting. Our case study is conducted by modifying an automated journalism system that generates multilingual news in three languages, namely English, Finnish and Swedish. We adapt existing methods for creative headlines and figurative language generation into the headline generation process of the system, modifying them to work in a multilingual setting. We conduct our evaluation by asking online judges to assess the original titles produced by the unmodified system and those enhanced by the methods described in this paper. The results of the evaluation suggest that the presented methods increase the creativity of existing headlines while maintaining their descriptiveness.