[Wikidata-l] Automatic summaries? - Wikidata

Luca Martinelli

7 Sep 7 Sep

11:12 a.m.

2013/9/7 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>:

I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages. If we have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence like "Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel prize, Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.

+1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though. -- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita

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Sven Manguard

5:32 p.m.

This has the potential to work, but we need to be careful that the descriptions don't only partially represent their subjects. This is especially difficult with humans, as they are often known for several things, and occasionally (but in a statistically significant number, I would think), known for things that don't fit cleanly into a "[nationality] [career], born [birth year]" formula. As it exists now, the Wikidata item on the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan [1], gives his military branch and rank, his location and place of birth, his gender, and a Commons category.

...

From that, a bot summary would likely be "American Army major, born 1970".

There would be no indication of his source of notability, the shooting. What I would recommend is that we start with inanimate objects and get our bearings on bot-generated descriptions there (celestial objects, video games, buildings), then move onto the slightly more complicated to define non-human living things (species of plant, species of animal, species of creepy-crawly) and geographic locations (rivers, villages/towns/cities, mountain ranges), and then finally onto humans. Some things to think about: How do you create a description for a battleship that saw service with several different navies or a river that runs through several different countries? How do you create a description for a country that does not exist anymore or a location that has been destroyed? How do you create a description for a fictional person, item, place, etc., when Wikidata does not currently have an effective way of denoting that something is fictional? It might make sense to use Wikipedia categories to augment the Wikidata statements. I think that we should build a few formulas that are... difficult to screw up. Video games come to mind, because the formula "[year of first publication] [genre] video game" is really all you need, and other than that some games have multiple genres, there's no way to get the description wrong. Once the people with coding knowledge figure out what they want to do implementation wise, I'll be happy to work with the formulas. [1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1400551#sitelinks-wikipedia On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Luca Martinelli <martinelliluca(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

...

2013/9/7 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>:

I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages. If

we

have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence

like

"Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel

prize,

Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.

+1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though. -- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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Sven Manguard

6:32 p.m.

I agree with all four of those points. As your question, we do not have that type of property yet, and although it might be slightly controversial, I would certainly support it. We would however need monolingual text as a property type before that could happen. Personally I see supporting web addresses as being much more critical on the list of properties for development, is that would dramatically open up our ability to source data. That being said, I really haven't been keeping up with the development schedule, so I have no idea what's in the pileline and in what order. S On Sep 7, 2013 1:44 PM, "Magnus Manske" <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

...

All valid points, Sven. I would just like to say that * this is not intended as a replacement or auto-fill for descriptions; it is to be shown if the manual description is blank (at least, that was my angle) * unusual items, like your example, will likely have a manual desription; the run-of-the-mill millitary person will not * for many uses, even an imperfect or (through omission) somewhat misleading description is better than none * as in your example, a misrepresentation is first and foremost due to the incompleteness of Wikidata and the properties it offers The last one reminds me: is there a "reason for notability" property? In your example item, the Ft. Hood shootings could be added that way, and then also show up in the description ("notable for Ft. Hood shooting"). On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Sven Manguard <svenmanguard(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

This has the potential to work, but we need to be careful that the descriptions don't only partially represent their subjects. This is especially difficult with humans, as they are often known for several things, and occasionally (but in a statistically significant number, I would think), known for things that don't fit cleanly into a "[nationality] [career], born [birth year]" formula. As it exists now, the Wikidata item on the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan [1], gives his military branch and rank, his location and place of birth, his gender, and a Commons category. From that, a bot summary would likely be "American Army major, born 1970". There would be no indication of his source of notability, the shooting. What I would recommend is that we start with inanimate objects and get our bearings on bot-generated descriptions there (celestial objects, video games, buildings), then move onto the slightly more complicated to define non-human living things (species of plant, species of animal, species of creepy-crawly) and geographic locations (rivers, villages/towns/cities, mountain ranges), and then finally onto humans. Some things to think about: How do you create a description for a battleship that saw service with several different navies or a river that runs through several different countries? How do you create a description for a country that does not exist anymore or a location that has been destroyed? How do you create a description for a fictional person, item, place, etc., when Wikidata does not currently have an effective way of denoting that something is fictional? It might make sense to use Wikipedia categories to augment the Wikidata statements. I think that we should build a few formulas that are... difficult to screw up. Video games come to mind, because the formula "[year of first publication] [genre] video game" is really all you need, and other than that some games have multiple genres, there's no way to get the description wrong. Once the people with coding knowledge figure out what they want to do implementation wise, I'll be happy to work with the formulas. [1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1400551#sitelinks-wikipedia On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Luca Martinelli <martinelliluca(a)gmail.com

wrote:

2013/9/7 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>:

I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages.

If we

have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence

like

"Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel

prize,

Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.

+1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though. -- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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Daniel Mietchen

8 Sep 8 Sep

12:08 a.m.

Just tried Magnus' demo. That's a good start - thanks! Daniel -- http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen http://okfn.org http://wikimedia.org On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

...

Putting code where my mouth is: If you add the line mw.loader.load('//tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/autodesc.js')js'); to your user subpage at : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Mypage/common.js you can see automatic descriptions is your Wikidata search results, both in the full search page and in the dropdown preview. Notes: * Hackish demo. May jump in your face at any time. * English only, though planned as multi-lingual. In other languages, some interface elements will show in English, but most of the actual description should be in your language, as available. * Automatic description color-highlighted, to distinguish from manual one (surprisingly hard in some cases). * Two of my test searches are "Dawkins" and "Runaway". Good spread of results there. * This works /in principle/ also in the edit dropdowns (you will see dummy text there), but I can't figure out how the item Q number is encoded in the dropdown HTML. A little help or a very minor interface tweak would enable the function there as well. Wikidata techs: Feel free to steal^W build on this code ;-) Hereby GPL or whatever else you require. Enjoy! On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:32 PM, Sven Manguard <svenmanguard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I agree with all four of those points. As your question, we do not have that type of property yet, and although it might be slightly controversial, I would certainly support it. We would however need monolingual text as a property type before that could happen. Personally I see supporting web addresses as being much more critical on the list of properties for development, is that would dramatically open up our ability to source data. That being said, I really haven't been keeping up with the development schedule, so I have no idea what's in the pileline and in what order. S On Sep 7, 2013 1:44 PM, "Magnus Manske" <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

All valid points, Sven. I would just like to say that * this is not intended as a replacement or auto-fill for descriptions; it is to be shown if the manual description is blank (at least, that was my angle) * unusual items, like your example, will likely have a manual desription; the run-of-the-mill millitary person will not * for many uses, even an imperfect or (through omission) somewhat misleading description is better than none * as in your example, a misrepresentation is first and foremost due to the incompleteness of Wikidata and the properties it offers The last one reminds me: is there a "reason for notability" property? In your example item, the Ft. Hood shootings could be added that way, and then also show up in the description ("notable for Ft. Hood shooting"). On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Sven Manguard <svenmanguard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

This has the potential to work, but we need to be careful that the descriptions don't only partially represent their subjects. This is especially difficult with humans, as they are often known for several things, and occasionally (but in a statistically significant number, I would think), known for things that don't fit cleanly into a "[nationality] [career], born [birth year]" formula. As it exists now, the Wikidata item on the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan [1], gives his military branch and rank, his location and place of birth, his gender, and a Commons category. From that, a bot summary would likely be "American Army major, born 1970". There would be no indication of his source of notability, the shooting. What I would recommend is that we start with inanimate objects and get our bearings on bot-generated descriptions there (celestial objects, video games, buildings), then move onto the slightly more complicated to define non-human living things (species of plant, species of animal, species of creepy-crawly) and geographic locations (rivers, villages/towns/cities, mountain ranges), and then finally onto humans. Some things to think about: How do you create a description for a battleship that saw service with several different navies or a river that runs through several different countries? How do you create a description for a country that does not exist anymore or a location that has been destroyed? How do you create a description for a fictional person, item, place, etc., when Wikidata does not currently have an effective way of denoting that something is fictional? It might make sense to use Wikipedia categories to augment the Wikidata statements. I think that we should build a few formulas that are... difficult to screw up. Video games come to mind, because the formula "[year of first publication] [genre] video game" is really all you need, and other than that some games have multiple genres, there's no way to get the description wrong. Once the people with coding knowledge figure out what they want to do implementation wise, I'll be happy to work with the formulas. [1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1400551#sitelinks-wikipedia On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Luca Martinelli <martinelliluca(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > 2013/9/7 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>: > > I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short > > descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages. > > If we > > have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence > > like > > "Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel > > prize, > > Victoria cross, etc.) could be added. > > +1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though. > > -- > Luca "Sannita" Martinelli > http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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