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Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles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 The system would then search Wikipedia, locate the appropriate page and outdated sentence, and rewrite it in a humanlike fashion.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.
(Score: 5, Funny) by idiot_king on Sunday February 16 2020, @03:54PM (2 children)
With the extreme right wing being ascendant in the current political atmosphere, with the takeover of institutions by the GOP they will without a doubt use this to overwrite factual history with their fake history in real time. This is such a bad idea that I can't understate it. This is Orwell on steroids. God help us.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Sunday February 16 2020, @05:57PM
1984 had humans doing the busy work of editing history, as an Ingsoc job creation exercise of socialist full employment.
By outsourcing the past to machines, recall that other great 1984 classic taught us not to trust Skynet.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by bradley13 on Sunday February 16 2020, @07:25PM
Because, of course, the left never rewrites history to suit itself. /sarc
However, if we take the left-right politics out of your comment, then you are right: whoever creates such a bit will, almost inevitably, build their personal bias. Left, right, anti-science, whatever. That is reality, and (as we see with automated copyright takedowns) it will be nearly impossible to correct the damned thing.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.