Meta has developed an AI to help check Wikipedia citations, a solution that could prove useful far beyond an online encyclopedia.
In 2020, the Wikipedia community was embroiled in a scandal after learning that an American teenager had written 27,000 articles in a language she did not speak. A reminder that the popular online encyclopedia is not a perfect source of information. Sometimes certain pages are edited on purpose, with pure evil intent, but errors can be introduced by people of good will. Meta wants to fix this with artificial intelligence.
Meta develops AI to help check Wikipedia quotes
This is a problem that the Wikimedia Foundation decided to address by working with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. To do this, both objects are targeted for quoting. The problem with footnotes on Wikipedia is that there are too many of them. The site registers over 17,000 new articles per month, and many citations are incomplete, missing, or inaccurate.
Meta has developed an artificial intelligence model that can automatically scan quotes to check their accuracy. The system can even suggest alternative citations if it finds a passage with too poor a source. When a human editor evaluates a quotation, they use common sense and experience. When artificial intelligence does the same job, it uses a natural language comprehension (NLU) transformation model to try to understand the relationships between words and phrases in a passage. The Meta’s Sphere database, which contains over 134 million web pages, serves as the knowledge base for the system. The model is designed to find a single source to test each claim.
A solution that can be useful far beyond the online encyclopedia
To illustrate the possibilities of his artificial intelligence, Meta gave an example of an incomplete quote. The algorithm managed to find a more interesting quote that doesn’t mention the main word but is much more relevant due to its natural language understanding capabilities. The tool could one day help Facebook deal with the problem of disinformation: “We hope our work can be used to aid fact-checking and increase overall trust in online news sites,”the creators of this artificial intelligence said. Meta, on the other hand, wants to provide a platform that Wikipedians can use to check and correct footnotes.