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Show HN: Dixit – Semantic search from quotation database

3 points by aubanel 4y ago

[LLM-based semantic search meets historical quotes] Hello HN, Want to sound smart, impress a date, get the right quotation to introduce this essay? Dixit lets you type an idea, and searches for historical quotations that roughly convey the the same idea, but probably in a cooler formulation + with the authority stamp of someone who has a Wikipedia page. I built it over the 3 last weekends (and a few nights). It was quite fun! Dixit uses 25,000 quotations, a light language model from HuggingFace hub, Django, Railway server, and some CSS animations that I find cool. The code is available at http://github.com/A-Roucher/dixit http://github.com/A-Roucher/dixit. Next thing I'll do is keep improving the database to remove some quotes and add many more. Please don't hesitate to propose improvements!

hk__2 4y ago
General note about quotes: a quote has an author AND a context: it can be an interview, a speech, a book. Most websites (including this one) forget the last part and just keep the quote and its author. This means it’s impossible to verify the quote, and since these websites tend to favor the amount of quotes instead of their trusthness they usually end up full of fakes. Just search for Albert Einstein here to get an idea of the issue [1]. One of the most reliable sources I know for this is Wikiquotes, where every quote must have a source to be included [2]. [1]: https://dixit.app/author/Albert%20Einstein/ https://dixit.app/author/Albert%20Einstein/ [2]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
- aubanel 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! Indeed the reliability is a real problem here. On the Einstein page you pointed out I see two vague reference to the "God does not play dice" citation which Einstein did not really say. However, using wikiquotes also comes with problems: the quotes are presented in an unstructured way, and often the whole paragraph is there instead of a short and impactful excerpt. I'll try to find a way to get the best of both worlds!

3 points by aubanel 4y ago

hk__2 4y ago

General note about quotes: a quote has an author AND a context: it can be an interview, a speech, a book. Most websites (including this one) forget the last part and just keep the quote and its author. This means it’s impossible to verify the quote, and since these websites tend to favor the amount of quotes instead of their trusthness they usually end up full of fakes. Just search for Albert Einstein here to get an idea of the issue [1]. One of the most reliable sources I know for this is Wikiquotes, where every quote must have a source to be included [2]. [1]: https://dixit.app/author/Albert%20Einstein/ https://dixit.app/author/Albert%20Einstein/ [2]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

aubanel 4y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! Indeed the reliability is a real problem here. On the Einstein page you pointed out I see two vague reference to the "God does not play dice" citation which Einstein did not really say. However, using wikiquotes also comes with problems: the quotes are presented in an unstructured way, and often the whole paragraph is there instead of a short and impactful excerpt. I'll try to find a way to get the best of both worlds!