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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 16 2020, @12:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.

Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles

A system created by MIT researchers could be used to automatically update factual inconsistencies in Wikipedia articles, reducing time and effort spent by human editors who now do the task manually.

Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of edits to reflect new information. That can involve article expansions, major rewrites, or more routine modifications such as updating numbers, dates, names, and locations. Currently, humans across the globe volunteer their time to make these edits.

In a paper being presented at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the researchers describe a text-generating system that pinpoints and replaces specific information in relevant Wikipedia sentences, while keeping the language similar to how humans write and edit.

The idea is that humans would type into an interface an unstructured sentence with updated information, without needing to worry about style or grammar. The system would then search Wikipedia, locate the appropriate page and outdated sentence, and rewrite it in a humanlike fashion. In the future, the researchers say, there's potential to build a fully automated system that identifies and uses the latest information from around the web to produce rewritten sentences in corresponding Wikipedia articles that reflect updated information.

"There are so many updates constantly needed to Wikipedia articles. It would be beneficial to automatically modify exact portions of the articles, with little to no human intervention," says Darsh Shah, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the lead authors. "Instead of hundreds of people working on modifying each Wikipedia article, then you'll only need a few, because the model is helping or doing it automatically. That offers dramatic improvements in efficiency."

Many other bots exist that make automatic Wikipedia edits. Typically, those work on mitigating vandalism or dropping some narrowly defined information into predefined templates, Shah says. The researchers' model, he says, solves a harder artificial intelligence problem: Given a new piece of unstructured information, the model automatically modifies the sentence in a humanlike fashion. "The other [bot] tasks are more rule-based, while this is a task requiring reasoning over contradictory parts in two sentences and generating a coherent piece of text," he says.


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  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:01PM (4 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:01PM (#958784) Journal

    Primary source of all acceptable news feeds is well known as Three Sisters: AP, AFP, Reuters.
    They always operate in concert. The triad of power. They provide confirmation bias too.
    All and any official narrative must conform to them, or be ostrakized. That's the first rule for the industry.

    Television outlets are only secondary worker processes for channeling, unimportant for sourcing. Blacklisting on just TVs will be ineffective to mitigate this disinformation machine in global scale.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:16PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:16PM (#958786) Journal

    You seem to be suggesting that a black list of all US sources would mean no news at all?

    What about Russia and China? Neither would provide news, then? Africa surely has some offerings of it's own. South America? I can see that Europe and what were formerly the British Commonwealth countries would all be gone. But, surely there would still be some sources to look at?

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:17PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:17PM (#958788) Homepage Journal

    Yeriḥo. Karthāgō. Sogdiana. Besièrs. 広島市 (Hiroshima-shi).

    I guess Yeriho is what I know as Jericho. Though the Wikipedia tells me modern archaeologists dispute the Biblical story of the Battle of Jericho.

    "Karthāgō delenda est". Aristarchus is probably old enough to remember those days.

    And I've certainly heard of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, which isn't on the list.

    But what are Sogdiana and Besièrs?

    -- hendrik

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @05:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @05:24PM (#958846)
      Besièrs is an alternate spelling of Béziers, a city in southern France where, during the Albigensian Crusade (1209), some 20,000 Cathars were massacred by the crusaders. It's where the infamous words: "Kill them all. God will know his own", come from.
  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:26PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:26PM (#958791) Homepage Journal

    Well, I'd say Communications of the ACM is pretty reliable too, and probably not echoed by the triad.