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Abstract Wikipedia
- memexy 6y ago> The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code, volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read about any topic in Wikidata in their own language. This is a great idea. I bet the translations will be interesting as well. I was wondering about how the translation was going to work and it looks like they thought of that as well. They're going to use code to help with the translation. > Wikilambda is a new Wikimedia project that allows to create and maintain code. This is useful in many different ways. It provides a catalog of all kind of functions that anyone can call, write, maintain, and use. It also provides code that translates the language-independent article from Abstract Wikipedia into the language of a Wikipedia. This allows everyone to read the article in their language. Wikilambda will use knowledge about words and entities from Wikidata.
- zozbot234 6y agoPretty-printing the abstract content into an arbitrary target language (a better way of putting it than "translation") would be quite the challenge, because "conceptual models" do vary by language. One can attempt to come up with something that's "as abstract/universal as possible" but it remains to be seen how practically useful that would be. For that matter, making the source model "logical" and "compositional", as implied by the Wikilambda idea, only opens up further cans of worms. Linguists and cognitive scientists have explored the idea of a "logical" semantics for natural language, even drawing on the λ-calculus itself (e.g. in Montague grammar and Montague semantics), but one can be sure that a lot of complexity will be involved in trying to express realistic notions by relying on anything like that.
- memexy 6y agoI didn't assume the translations would be lossless. It's obvious there will be conceptual mismatches but that's why this is interesting. Because when the abstract model is made concrete people can notice the gaps and improve the abstract model. I can imagine a feedback loop that improves both the abstract and concrete/translated models as people work on improving both to reduce the conceptual gaps between the abstract and concrete models.
- numpad0 6y agoI’m starting to feel the structure and content of “abstract content” is going to be quite like Wikipedia pages in target languages zipped into single archive plus overheads...
- cochne 6y agoIf successful, this could open huge doors in machine translation and NLP. Very cool.
- coding123 6y agoIt kinda would, basically a huge library of labelled NLP data may come available as the result of this.
- ethhics 6y agoThis appears to be an attempt to make a Wikipedia using the semantic data from Wikidata. The semantic web ideas of Tim Berners-Lee may be catching on.
- Schoolmeister 6y agoThat already happens, that's what Wikidata does. [0] [0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:RDF https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:RDF
- xacky 6y agoWill this mean it will be like the bot generated Wikipedias (like the Cebuano Wikipedia) except it will be done by a Wikidata powered template? It might work for basic data-based facts like populations of villages but what about more complicated statements.
- dankohn1 6y agoSorry to be the typical pessimistic HN commenter (e.g., Dropbox is just ftp), but this seems ambitious enough to remind me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc.
- carapace 6y agoI don't think that's pessimistic, more like cautionary. For a project like this it behooves them (IMO) to do a "related work" review, eh?
- zozbot234 6y agoEven Wikidata today is already a lot more usable and scalable than Cyc. The latter always seemed like a largely-pointless proof of concept; Wikidata by contrast is very clearly something that can contain real info, and be queried in useful ways. (Of course knowledge is not always consistently represented, but that issue is inherent to any general-purpose knowledge base - and Wikidata does at least try to address it, if only via leveraging the well-known principle "many eyes make all bugs shallow".)
- khaidardotco 6y agoWith regards to bugs apparently largest human by mass is 20 years old gymnast: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15710550 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15710550
- amirouche 6y ago
- blondin 6y agotruly love the mobile design of wikipedia and find myself adding ".m" to every link that i visit on wikipedia. it has larger fonts, more readable copy (for me at least), and works great on mobile. surprisingly the trick worked with this one as well! how come the mobile design is not the default?
- Kuinox 6y agoOn mobile I struggle to remove the m. on every link. The mobile version does not work well with the research feature, and I never took time to know where do you switch to another language.
- pvg 6y agoIronically, switching to different language versions of the same page is irritating on the mobile version.
- Kiro 6y agoHow do you even do it? My biggest compliant about the mobile site.
- pvg 6y agoI seem to remember it used to be a foldout thingie as you scrolled down (at which point you might as well just hit the 'Desktop' link at the bottom). But apparently no more! I just found it again after some intense staring - it's the icon with two characters on the far left of the bar right under the article title.
- Kiro 6y agoWow, I've seen that button many times but I was almost certain it was related to something... else. Thank you!
- forgotpwd16 6y agoBecause it is limited in design. It misses the sidebar which has useful links, the discussion page, the history page, doesn't have account links. Also the more compact text the desktop version is preferable to some. You can automatically redirect to the mobile version if you want using a user script. I'm using a similar one for the reverse. Edit: Here you're. https://gist.github.com/leakypixel/1b0a30fbdc815016c14264b82172d841 https://gist.github.com/leakypixel/1b0a30fbdc815016c14264b82...
- sciurus 6y agoA more detailed introduction to the idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... A draft implementation plan: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Plan https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Plan
- thom 6y agoAnything that gives a boost to Wikidata is great. Being able to run queries over wiki remains one of the most magical things on the internet: https://query.wikidata.org/ https://query.wikidata.org/
- yorwba 6y agoI recently learned that words and translations from Wiktionary are in Wikidata's graph as well, which enables e.g. this simple lemmatizer: https://tools.wmflabs.org/ordia/text-to-lexemes https://tools.wmflabs.org/ordia/text-to-lexemes (The Wikidata query it uses is linked at the bottom.)
- mormegil 6y agoLexical content on Wikidata is (unfortunately) separate and independent of Wiktionary. Same topic, different execution (and much smaller coverage at the moment). https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data
- simple_phrases 6y agoThanks for sharing this, didn't know it existed.
- visarga 6y agoIt's magic but the SparQL language is very hard to learn.
- machiaweliczny 6y agoThere are some libs that simplify access like for example https://github.com/molybdenum-99/reality https://github.com/molybdenum-99/reality
- meej 6y agoIt's the identifiers that make querying Wikidata difficult, IMO. SPARQL is pretty easy, certainly no more difficult than SQL. It might even be easier than SQL since there are no joins.
- raptortech 6y agoAI Researchers: heavy breathing
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoReminder that wiki means quick, so when you read Wikipedia you only have surface knowledge,
- shadowgovt 6y agoAs the set of information encoded into Wikipedia approaches the sum total of human knowledge, there's no particular reason that needs to remain true.
- adventured 6y ago> As the set of information encoded into Wikipedia approaches the sum total of human knowledge An outcome Wikipedia will never get close to. They'll never reach 1% of the way there. Closer to 0% of human knowledge gets recorded, rather than closer to 1%. Of the knowledge that is recorded, a small fraction of it will end up on Wikipedia. Most of what gets recorded is universal or widely experienced knowledge, which is a miniscule subset of "the sum total of human knowledge." Wikipedia has already begun to stagnate badly. For the most part, it's over. That's why they're attempting Abstract Wikipedia now (aka another round of the failed insular semantic Web for elite Wiki nerds that won't accomplish much of anything for the average reader that wants to learn something); and it's why Wikimedia wants to rebrand itself to Wikipedia; and it's why their system is being overtaken by partisan politics (as momentum continues to decline the system will rot and pull apart in various negative ways at an accelerating clip). The growth is running out, and the Wiki bureaucracy wants to keep expanding, that's what this is about.
- jborichevskiy 6y ago> They'll never reach 1% of the way there > Closer to 0% of human knowledge gets recorded > Wikipedia has already begun to stagnate badly Anything more concrete you can link to for further reading on this? I understand the difficulty in quantifying such claims and measures but I'd appreciate reading something that attempts to do so objectively.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 6y agoThere could be some very interesting meta analytics that could be done on knowledge structured in this way. For example, this research which identifies the structural differences in the fact graphs of conspiracy theories vs accurate accounts: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories-emergeand-storylines-fall.html https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories-emergeand-...
- xtacy 6y agoInteresting link, thanks for sharing. I wonder what this means precisely: If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart. I guess I have to read the paper, but what are these "connections" and what does "fall apart" actually mean? EDIT: I just skimmed the paper https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233879 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... The connections capture context-specific relationships, such as co-occurrences. The "fall apart" part comes from the fact that conspiracy theories rely on hidden, unsubstantiated, subjective interpretations of intent or actions whose validity can be questioned. If they are key pillars of the narrative, then their falsity can negate the truth of the narrative. This reminds me of a philosophical discussion around what "truth" means. Coherent theory of truth: truth is defined as a property that's coherent among a set of beliefs. It can also be used as an epistemic justification -- that is, any set of internally consistent beliefs can be taken as true. Of course, in practice, certain truth statements have to correspond to reality, which is where the correspondence theory of truth comes in.
- samizdis 6y agoGreat article. Thanks for the recommendation/link.
- xvilka 6y agoSemantic Web[1] reborn (after alleged[2] death)? Also I wonder how helpful Prolog infrastructure could be since they provided some useful frameworks [3][4] for that. [1] https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ [2] https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html [3] https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/ https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/ [4] https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27packages/semweb.html%27) https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p...
- LukeEF 6y agoThe prolog renaissance is unstoppable!
- memexy 6y agoTwobithistory article is pretty good. Outlines several things I wasn't aware of like DBPedia.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> Also I wonder how helpful Prolog infrastructure could be since they provided some useful frameworks [3][4] for that. That's a good point, because looking at the working paper on the proposed architecture of the project [1], the example of a "constructor" in Figure 1 is basically a set of frames and it has a straightforward translation in Prolog and the example of a "renderer" in English is basically a pattern with holes that also has a very straightforward Prolog implementation via Definite Clause Grammars. In fact the whole architecture reminds me a lot of IBM's Watson - the good bits (i.e. the Prolog stuff they used to store the knowledgebase). ________ [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.04733.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.04733.pdf
- JadeNB 6y agoReminder to link to abstracts, rather than directly to PDF: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 .
- 6y ago
- random04243 6y agoThis is of course an interesting idea, but it has a number of huge technical hurdles to overcome. Here is the biggest: Right now, if you want to become an editor of Wikipedia, you simply need to have a passing familiarity with wikitext, and how the syntax of wikitext translates into the final presentation of the article. However, if you want to become an editor of Abstract Wikipedia, you'd need to have an in-depth knowledge of lambda calculus, and possibly a Ph.D. in linguistics. Without a quantum leap in editing technology and accessibility for beginners, there's little hope for this to gain any traction.
- memexy 6y agoWhy do you need a PhD in linguistics to write code?
- deanstag 6y agoI am sure that was hyperbole.
- memexy 6y agoYes. I know.
- random04243 6y agoIt's not just writing code, it's writing code that needs to be aware of every linguistic nuance of your native language, so that you can coax the data to come out as a human-readable sentence. [1] [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Examples https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Examples
- Ninjaneered 6y agoFor reference, this is from the same developer [1] that created Semantic MediaWiki [2] and lead the development of Wikidata [3]. Here's a link to the white paper [4] describing Abstract Wikipedia (and Wikilambda). Considering the success of Wikidata, I'm hopeful this effort succeeds, but it is pretty ambitious. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733
- xiler 6y agoHe also works on Google's Knowledge Graph https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/691b38437acf640f8f1cbb939c6bbc76267b739c.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
- O_H_E 6y agoDamn. Big kudos to Denny. And to all the other people doing awesome work but not on the top of HN.
- gcbw3 6y agoConsidering the close relationship with Google and Wikimedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia and the considerable money Google gives them, how can one not see this project as "crowdsourcing better training data-sets for Google?" Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar?
- bawolff 6y agoI dont think the relationship is that close - all it says is google donated a chunk of money in 2010 and in 2019, it was a large chunk of money(~3% of donations) but not like so much to make a dependency. > Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar? Pretty unlikely tbh. I dont know if anything is decided for licensing, but if it is to be a "copyleft" license it would be cc-by-sa (like wikipedia) since this is not a program. Keep in mind that in the united states, an abstract list of facts cannot be copyrighted afaik (i dont think this qualifies as that, wikidata might though)
- crazygringo 6y agoI think a consistent multilingual Wikipedia is a fantastic goal. But I'm not sure this is the right way to do it. Given that most of the information on Wikipedia is "narrative", and doesn't consist of facts contained in Wikidata (e.g. a history article recounting a battle, or a movie article explaining the plot), this scope for this will be extremely limited. The creators are attempting to address this by actually containing every single aspect of a movie's plot as a fact, and that sentences are functions that express those facts... but this seems entirely unwieldy and just too much work. What I've wished for instead, for years, is actually an underlying "metalanguage" that expresses the vocabulary and grammatical concepts in all languages. Very loosely, think of an "intermediate" linguistic representation layer in Google Translate. Obviously nobody can write in that directly in a user-friendly way. But what you could do is take English (or any language) text, do an automated translation into that intermediate representation, then ask the author or volunteers to identify all ambiguous language cases" -- e.g. it would ask if "he signed" means made his signature, or communicated in sign language. It would also ask for things that would need clarification perhaps not in your own language but in other languages -- e.g. what noun does "it" refer to, so another language will know to use the masculine or feminine version. All of this can be done within your own language to produce an accurate language-agnostic "text". Then, out of this intermediate canonical interpretation, every article on Wikipedia would be generated back out of it, in all languages, and perfectly accurately, because the output program isn't even ML, it's just a straight-up rule engine. Interestingly, an English-language original might be output just a little bit different but in ways that don't change the meaning. Almost like a language "linter". Anyways -- I think it would actually be doable. The key part is a "Google Translate"-type tool that does 99% of the work. It would need manual curation of the intermediate layer with a professional linguist from each language, as well as manually curated output rules (although those could be generated by ML as a first pass). But something like that could fundamentally change communication. Imagine if any article you wanted to make available perfectly translated to anyone, you could do, just with the extra work of resolving all the ambiguities a translating program finds.
- amirouche 6y ago> But what you could do is take English... Then it is not english but a subset of english. They are translation systems that work the way you describe already using restricted natural language grammars.
- sukilot 6y ago> Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, Shows a deep misunderstanding of how human language works.
- microcolonel 6y agoAs a regular user of at least four Wikipedias, this seems like a very attractive direction. Interested to see whether it produces the outcomes it's designed for.
- Jasper_ 6y agoSo do people find Wikidata that impressive? Here's what Wikidata says about Earth, an item that is number 2 in the ID list, and also on their front page as an example of incredible data. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2 I struggle to find anything interesting on this page. It is apparently a "topic of geography", whatever that means as a statement. It has a WordLift URL. It is an instance of an inner planet. The first perhaps verifiable, solid fact, that Earth has a diameter of "12,742 kilometre", is immediately suspect. There is no clarifying remark, not even a note, that Earth is not any uniform shape and cannot have a single value as its diameter. This is my problem with SPARQL, with "data bases", in that sense. Data alone is useless without a context or a framework in which it can be truly understood. Facts like this can have multiple values depending on exactly what you're measuring, or what you're using the measurement for. And this on the page for Earth, an example that is used on their front page, and has the ID of 2. It is the second item to ever be created in Wikidata, after Q1, "Universe", and yet everything on it is useless.
- visarga 6y agoI find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, relation, object). It's being used to disambiguate concepts, named entities and support machine learning models with general knowledge in a standard format. There are plenty of papers on the topic of link prediction, auto-completion and triplet mining. Also, if you look: > radius: 6,378.137±0.001 kilometre > applies to part: equator So it clearly states how the radius was measured.
- Jasper_ 6y ago> I find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, relation, object). We're talking about a research project with a large amount of funding to go from the former to the latter. But pretty much none of the stuff on Earth's Wikipedia page is represented here. > applies to part: equator An equator (the general concept to which the ontology links to) has no given orientation. Earth's Equator is a human construct distinct from an oblate spheroid's equator, as are the specific locations of the poles. Nowhere is it specified in the ontology that this is measured at a specific Equator, not just any equator. This is all human context and understanding that we've built on top, and it's part of what I mean when I say that the data is kinda pointless. All of these facts depend on culture to understand.
- sitkack 6y agoHolyShit! > The goal of Abstract Wikipedia is to let more people share in more knowledge in more languages. Abstract Wikipedia is an extension of Wikidata. In Abstract Wikipedia, people can create and maintain Wikipedia articles in a language-independent way. A Wikipedia in a language can translate this language-independent article into its language. Code does the translation. from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia Will this mean that knowledge is encoded in machine readable format and that we can start to write programs over this knowledge graph? This is huge.
- afandian 6y agoThe Abstract Wikipedia idea is a great advance. > knowledge is encoded in machine readable format and that we can start to write programs over this knowledge graph But surely that abilty has been the goal of wikidata from the start?
- coolreader18 6y agoPerhaps, but this seems to be moving towards a more holistic machine-readable article graph. If you look at a page from wikidata[0], it seems to be basically a key-value database (e.g. earth.highest point = [ mount everest { from sea level, 8000m } ], while the "full article" terminology used in the announcement seems like it may be even more connected/informative/structured than that. [0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2
- afandian 6y agoAgreed, but my point was that the aim has always been to encode these facts and then mix them into wikipedia for any assertion / attribute, so that any fact is backed by an assertion.
- Vinnl 6y agoExactly. The main difference is that they would now not be used to generate the infoboxes, but actual prose.
- miket 6y agoHi, founder of Diffbot here, we are an AI research company spinout from Stanford that generate the world's largest knowledge graph from crawling the whole web. I didn't want to comment, but I see a lot of misunderstandings here about knowledge graphs, abstract representations of language, and the extent as to which this project uses ML. First of all, having a machine-readable database of knowledge(i.e. Wikidata) is no doubt a great thing. It's maintained by a large community of human curators and always growing. However, generating actually useful natural language that rivals the value you get from reading a Wikipedia page from an abstract representation is problematic. If you look at the walkthrough for how this would work (https://github.com/google/abstracttext/blob/master/eneyj/docs/walkthrough.md https://github.com/google/abstracttext/blob/master/eneyj/doc...), this project does not use machine and uses CFG-like production rules to generate natural sentences. Works great for generating toy sentences like "X is a Y". However, human languages are not programming languages. Many natural languages, like German and Finnish, are so syntactically and morphologically complex that there is no compact ruleset that can describe them. (those that have taken grammar class can relate to the number of exceptions to the ruleset) Additionally, not every sentence in a typical Wikipedia article can be easily represented in a machine-readable factual format. Plenty of text is opinion, subjective, or describes notions that don't have an proper entity. Of course there are ways that engineer around this, however they will exponential grow the complexity of your ontology, number of properties, and make for a terrible user experience for the annotators. A much better and direct approach to the stated intention of making the knowledge accessible to more readers is to advance the state of machine translation, which would capture nuance and non-facts present in the original article. Additionally, exploring ML-based ways of NL generation from the dataset this will produce will have academic impact.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoThis is addressed in the white paper describing the project's architecture: 10.2 Machine translation Another widely used approach —mostly for readers, much less for contributors— is the use of automatic translation services like Google Translate. A reader finds an article they are interested in and then asks the service to translate itinto a language they understand. Google Translate currently supports about a hundred languages — about a third of thelanguages Wikipedia supports. Also the quality of these translations can vary widely — and almost never achieves thequality a reader expects from an encyclopedia [33, 86].* Unfortunately, the quality of the translations often correlates with the availability of content in the given language [1],which leads to a Matthew effect: languages that already have larger amounts of content also feature better results intranslation. This is an inherent problem with the way Machine Translation is currently trained, using large corpora. Whereas further breakthroughs in Machine Translation are expected [43], these are hard to plan for. In short, relying on Machine Translation may delay the achievement of the Wikipedia mission by a rather unpredictabletime frame. One advantage Abstract Wikipedia would lead to is that Machine Translation system can use the natural language generation system available in Wikilambda to generate high-quality and high-fidelity parallel corpora for even morelanguages, which can be used to train Machine Translation systems which then can resolve the brittleness a symbolic system will undoubtedly encounter. So Abstract Wikipedia will increase the speed Machine Translation will become better and cover more languages in. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 (Theres's more discussion of machine learning in the paper but I'm quoting the section on machine translation in particular).
- ImaCake 6y agoPeople might be interested to know that semantic web ideas have been more successful in some niches than others. Computational biology for example makes extensive use of "ontologies" which are domain specific DAGs that do exactly what Abstract Wikipedia is attempting. Much of the analysis of organism's genomes and related sequences relies on these ontologies to automatically annotate the results so that meaningfull relationships can be discovered. There are of course HUGE issues with the ontologies. They are not sexy projects so they are often underfunded and under resourced - even though the entirety of bioinformatics uses them! The ontologies are incomplete and sometimes their information is years behind the current research. For the curious, the Gene Ontology is the golden child of biology ontologies. See here: http://geneontology.org/ http://geneontology.org/
- jchook 6y agoAmazingly fascinating field. I have learned a (very) small amount about this from Dr. David Sinclair's book Lifespan
- somerandomboi 6y agoI’m pretty interested in this actually. Although I’m not part of the Wikidata community, it would be interesting to see which language groups dictate the most involvement.
- polyterative 6y agoholy fuck
- keane 6y agoExample notation for the project, called AbstractText: ———— Input 1: Subclassification(Wikipedia, Encyclopedia) Result 1: English: Wikipedias are encyclopedias. German: Wikipedien sind Enzyklopädien. ———— Input 2: Article( content: [ Instantiation( instance: San Francisco (Q62), class: Object_with_modifier_and_of( object: center, modifier: And_modifier( conjuncts: [cultural, commercial, financial] ), of: Northern California (Q1066807) ) ), Ranking( subject: San Francisco (Q62), rank: 4, object: city (Q515), by: population (Q1613416), local_constraint: California (Q99), after: [Los Angeles (Q65), San Diego (Q16552), San Jose (Q16553)] ) ] ) Result 2: English: San Francisco is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose. German: San Francisco ist das kulturelle, kommerzielle und finanzielle Zentrum Nordkaliforniens. Es ist, nach Los Angeles, San Diego und San Jose, die viertgrößte Stadt in Kalifornien. ———— I didn’t understand quite what the proposal was until I saw these examples from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples
- StavrosK 6y agoI wonder what happens in more literal languages, where "center" doesn't mean "main area".
- willbudd 6y agoHopefully some word sense index is applied (or implied).
- sbergot 6y agoThis is one big hurdle I think. If one has to refer to the english meaning of words for the whole project to work, then how is this different from just writing the whole thing in english and translating everything from this?
- dan-robertson 6y ago
- jumelles 6y agoThis is what I hope the future of Wikipedia looks like. If all "facts" are stored in Wikidata and pulled from there by individual articles, it would be simple to keep things up to date. I'd love to see Wikidata grow to encompass all sorts of things - citations would be especially interesting and it could potentially solve the problem of an article citing the same source multiple times.
- ppur 6y agoIt's also interesting to note that, already, bots on some Wikipedias are the largest contributors of articles in that language. The Swedish, Waray, and Cebuano Wikipedias already have an estimated "between 80% and 99% of the total" all written by one bot, Lsjbot [1]. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
- renewiltord 6y agoI wonder if lsjbot has increased single contribution users. Wikipedia (or EN Wikipedia anyway) gates article creation but not editing. If other Wikipedias do that as well, then single edit users won't be able to create an article and hence can't contribute. But if lsjbot has created the stub then people can contribute.
- fbarred 6y agoMy first reaction was to look for a Wikipedia article for an overview of this. I couldn't find one yesterday, but one was created today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia
- yewenjie 6y agoCan really please ELI5 what the end product would look like? Couldn't understand anything concrete from the article.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoThis article from the SignPost is much more informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- gainsurier 6y agoIt seems that it is the LLVM in Linguistics. > Such a translation to natural languages is achieved through the encoding of a lot of linguistic knowledge and of algorithms and functions to support the creation of the human-readable renderings of the content
- csande17 6y agoA Wikipedia Signpost article[1] gives a more detailed overview of the goals of the project, but it also made me think of an interesting failure case. From the article: > Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)). But Q1343202 doesn't mean "denial" as in "preventing someone else from getting something", it means "denial" as in "refusing to accept reality". (See [2].) The two concepts are represented by the same word in English, but they might not be in other languages. It seems like it'd be kind of tricky to create an interface that ensures other English-speaking editors indicate the right meaning of "denial". [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost... [2] https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1343202 https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1343202
- bawolff 6y agoI think the answer is be as clear as possible in the interface, but also accept mistakes will be made. People make grammar mistakes in (normal) wikipedia all the time, then other people come along and fix them. I expect the same will occur here.
- iandanforth 6y agoExtremely high barrier to entry. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
- young_unixer 6y agoMight be a good idea, but the multilingual argument doesn't convince me one bit. If this project is any useful, it won't be because of its multilingual part. Any person worth reading in STEM fields already knows English, and I don't know why anyone would want to read Wikipedia in any language other than English. I'm Latin American. I used the Internet in Spanish in my early teens before learning English, and it's a joke compared the English Internet. I don't even like English from a grammatical and phonetical point of view, but trying to cater to the non-English-speaking public seems like a waste of time in 2020. Just learn English already if you don't know it, it will be a much better use of your time than reading subpar material in another language.
- rtpg 6y ago> Any person worth reading in STEM fields already knows English, and I don't know why anyone would want to read Wikipedia in any language other than English. > Just learn English already if you don't know it Some people are merely fine at English, or uncomfortable reading "casually" in their second/third languages... It's actually not unreasonable for someone to want learning content in their native language. And there are loads of opportunities to try out new content when people in different places are writing content in different languages, with new angles and takes For example the best intro to LaTeX is a book originally written in French[0]. And sometimes content just makes better sense in other languages because primary materials will be in that language (if you had the choice, would you rather read about the great Tokyo Fire in English or in Japanese?) Sure, having access to English content is really important! But trying to have multilingual content is normal. [0]: https://www.latexpourlimpatient.fr/ https://www.latexpourlimpatient.fr/
- sajforbes 6y ago> Any person worth reading in STEM fields already knows English, and I don't know why anyone would want to read Wikipedia in any language other than English That's not the goal of Wikipedia. The goal is to make knowledge freely available to as many people as possible. That's fantastic that you were given the opportunity to learn English and have made the best of it. That is not everyone though. It's not reasonable to expect a farmer in Malaysia to know English or to learn it purely to take advantage of what's there.
- tasogare 6y agoThe research article doesn’t mention UNL a single time, despite it being a really similar effort (encoding texts in an abstract representation, which is generated and use by tools to translate automatically in various languages). The hard part of the project is not encoding facts into cute little RDF triples (that’s the super easy part, and as usual that’s where the SemWeb researchers put their focus on), it’s generating natural language from the abstract representation. This means precise linguistics information must be present in the abstract representation for generation of correct sentences. Spoiler: those seems absent, and the renders presented in the paper are very basic. The data part of the project seems OK, but I predict it would go well because the NLP is largely ignored.
- zelly 6y agoWhat's the point of this with the current high quality of state-of-the-art machine translation? Don't we expect machine translation to surpass humans in the near future? People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. They should just edit the articles in natural language. A lot of the content of Wikidata isn't numbers and is natural language also, so you'd still need to (machine?) translate it. But this time the machine translation algorithm would not have the benefit of the long-term context from the encompassing paragraph. There are too many reasons why this is a bad idea. Almost makes me mad.
- moriturius 6y agoThey are not solving your problem. They are solving theirs. This is an experimental project so there is nothing to be angry about. Time will tell if this was a good idea or not.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoWhere is the high quality machine translation? I spend most of my time in countries where I don't speak the same language as the majority of people and text that I encounter, so I am using machine translation many times per day. My experience of the average quality of machine translation is extremely low. It garbles meaning a majority of the time, and in a significant minority of cases destroys meaning completely. To me the idea that you could translate an encyclopedia, where accuracy of meaning is critical, using such technology in its current state is horrifying. By contrast the abstract/semantic approach seems to have some potential, although I can't imagine it working well for all articles.
- yellowapple 6y ago> People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. My impression (correct me if I'm wrong, though) is that this is less "domain experts writing code" and more "editors can export a Wikidata 'subject' to a prebuilt translated page that domain experts can later expand". The aim of Wikidata is to collect information in a language-agnostic way, whereas the aim of Abstract Wikipedia seems to be to take that information and turn it into autogenerated pages in whatever language (even if that page is more-or-less a stub).
- ComodoHacker 6y agoI don't quite get what problem it's trying to solve. Save labor? Improve factual consistency across languages?
- 20after4 6y ago"Knowledge Equity." To increase the availability of knowledge for speakers of less popular languages. Once encoded in Abstract form, it can be made available in every human language. That is an improvement over the current situation where knowledge is concentrated in just a few of the most popular languages.
- blahedo 6y agoAnyone who has studied old-school AI will know that this is an incredibly ambitious project; it is essentially throwing itself at the problem of "knowledge frames", i.e. how to encode information about the world in a way that an AI system can access it and, well, be intelligent about it. (Also at the problem of natural language generation, but as hard as that is, at the moment it seems like the easier of the two.) But... One of the biggest problems with a lot of the old "Big AI" projects that were developing some sort of knowledge frames (and there were several, and some of them still exist and have public faces) was, who the hell is going to get all the info in there in a way that's complete enough to be useful? Now you have a learning problem on top of the knowledge representation problem. But throw the wikimedia community at it and crowdsource the information? This actually starts to seem plausible.
- dannyw 6y agoEven if it's not successful, there's certainly enough interest in it to make it worth trying. Maybe we only get 30% of the way. So what? That's 30% more than zero!
- Tistron 6y agoTechnically, 30% more than zero is still zero though. But yeah 30% of the way more than zero is something :-)
- tasogare 6y agoYes, and the paper do only lists 2 relevant references regarding the decades of work in this domain.
- skybrian 6y agoIt seems more similar to an elaborate version of the internationalization and translation of messages done in any program that targets multiple languages? If you think of it as a principled template language for generating text from the results of canned database queries, it starts seeming a lot more feasible. The templates themselves do need to be translated into every language, much like the messages in internationalization. Ideally this enables something like an improved version of the ICU library, with a lot more data available.
- aaron695 6y agoThis has been tried and failed many times before. Why is this different? What is the fundamental structural difference that will allow this to work?
- ricardo81 6y agoThere are many more English articles than any other language on Wikipedia, even though there's more non-English speakers in the world. To me, it seems this project will allow for at least "stub" articles in essentially every-other-language which at the very least provides some basic information about each entity to a reader in their preferred language.
- needle0 6y agoI hope at least 20-30% of the people involved in the project are at least near-native level speakers of non-Indo-European languages. Linguistic biases based on your mother tongue die hard, and I know this from having waded through tons and tons of software designed with biases built-in that woefully disregard Asian syntax, typography, input, grammar, semantics, etc etc etc. As the whole point of the project is multilingual support, I really hope the developers don’t underestimate how grammatically and semantically distant different language families can be.
- shultays 6y agoWouldn't improving online translation tools achieve the same thing? And a much more reasonable task perhaps (or perhaps not, I am not the expert) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples I used google translate on English sentences on English sentences here and they outputted exact same German sentences. I feel like this is already a somewhat solved problem