(A version with links is available on-wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-09-30 )
Hello all,
Abstract Wikipedia will be a long journey, and I expect the project to
shift and pivot over time. Our ultimate goal is clear: a system that allows
more people to share more knowledge with more people, across languages. And
we have an idea which path we are going to take.
Runa Bhattacharjee, the lead of the WMF’s language team made the suggestion
to keep a journal or blog of our journey, and I will try to follow the
suggestion. The posts will be personal, reflective, aspirational, trying to
capture unfinished thoughts. Maybe we’ll have guest posts. These might,
over time, morph into more structured weekly updates. We see how it goes.
I also will try to not have the posts be too long and meandering, which is
particularly hard in the beginning, when there is so much still
undiscussed. I constantly feel like I want to say more about everything in
here, but I will try to keep these posts succinct, and will come back to
many of the topics later. If there is anything you are particularly
interested in, let me know!
So, how have our first three months been? We are a small team, so the code
base development is going on slowly. The advantage of things moving slowly
is that we have the time to think through different options, and to
socialize the idea of what we are doing more widely with the communities,
with the many related teams, and others. I have been busy with writing
documents, getting settled into a new job, and giving presentations to a
wide number of stakeholders.
At the same time, I was trying to read up the discussions on the mailing
list and the wiki, and follow up on what the enthusiastic community is
doing. We had a volunteer, ZI Jony, create Facebook pages and Telegram
chats and IRC channels and more pages on-wiki, and it was all great to
watch. It looks like we as a community are figuring out our communication
channels, and it’s looking like a great start: in July, our mailing list
has been the most active public mailing list across the whole movement.
Things have cooled down since then, but community members are busily
working on gathering the state of the art in natural language generation
and other tasks - thanks for the volunteering effort by GrounderUK, Chris
Cooley, and Adam Sobieski for their contributions. Nick has caught up on
the ongoing conversations and existing documents, and will be the crucial
link between the development team and the communities. He has now started
and is leading the vote for the name of the wiki of functions - the first
voting round started yesterday, spread the word and join the voting! So
far, more than 150 proposals have been collected, displaying the amazing
creativity of our community.
Adam has been invaluable in helping me navigate the Foundation, and setting
up meetings with people inside the Foundation. There are so many teams
whose work will be paramount to the success of Abstract Wikipedia, and we
are starting to have some of the meetings. Be it legal, be it comms, be it
the community relation experts, be it partnerships, be it the language
team, be it SRE, design, security, performance, analytics, or one of the
many other teams we are working with - a project like Abstract Wikipedia
obviously doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but in the context of a larger
organization, which in turn is embedded in an even larger movement. And in
fact, this is the only way such a project even has a shot at succeeding.
Adam is also leading to find our first new hire and has posted the job
description for a full-stack software engineer. We hope for more positions
opening soon.
Regarding our code base, James has been turning requirements and vague
wishes into architecture and code. Thanks to James’s in-depth knowledge of
the MediaWiki code base, he was able to set up the WikiLambda extension and
build a solid foundation for further development quickly. We have defined
eleven phases to take us to the launch of the wiki of functions, and so far
we have finished the first one, phase α, which allows us to store objects
in MediaWiki. Phase β is currently in full swing, and allows for the
objects to be typed and types to be created. We are also very thankful to
Arthur P. Smith, a volunteer, who has created frontend components in Vue
that provide a first version of an editing interface. His first patch
landed last week. Arthur is also joining our daily stand-up meetings once a
week. If you want to help with development, please reach out. A screenshot
of Arthur’s results is available - and also a demo system, set up by Lucas
Werkmeister (in his volunteer capacity), is up and running. Lucas and
Arthur, you're awesome!
There are currently so many ideas floating and being discussed and so many
wishes and hopes being projected onto Abstract Wikipedia, that it is almost
a given that we will disappoint some of those. Apologies for that. I as
well have great expectations as to where the project will lead to, and when
I allow myself to dream, I imagine that this will be groundbreaking and
change fundamentally not only the way Wikipedia works, but have impact well
beyond that. But then I remind myself that projects like these have a
terrible history of failing, and I plan to get to some of these failures in
the following posts. And what we can learn from them.
I am extremely grateful for the very warm welcome to the project by the
communities. Now, one of the steps for us is to manage expectations. First,
we are a very small, exploratory project - so don’t expect us to launch a
wiki next week. Or next month. Next year? That’s our current plan. Also,
even when we launch, we will launch with a very minimal project. There
won’t be an integration into local Wikipedias yet. There won’t be any
support for natural language generation (that is planned for 2022, if all
goes well). And in fact, I am afraid, it will be even confusing, because
we’re starting with a wiki for the collaborative curation of a catalog of
functions, and there might well be the question, why are we doing this and
not focusing on the generation of text for the local Wikipedias? And what
is a function anyway and why do we need a catalog of these? I will come
back to this in future posts. You can see our current best attempt at a
clear and concise explanation of functions at the main project page.
I want to end each post with a list of things that can be done right now,
things as actionable as possible. Feel free to send suggestions my way.
Things to do:
* Vote in the first round of the Wiki of function naming contests (new
proposals are also still allowed). The first vote ends October 13.
* Work on lexicographic knowledge in Wikidata. I will come to how central
this is in later posts, but this will be needed for Abstract Wikipedia to
succeed and can be worked on right now.
Cheers,
Denny
Hi Amir,
I understand the process is different that usual research. In fact I've seen Wikipedia grown from an unknown website to the biggest encyclopedia it is now. I use it daily in multiple languages and love it. I know what crowd sourcing could achieve.
> It's also possible that the mere *finding* of these stumbling blocks by such a big, diverse, open, and active community, will itself be a contribution to the scientific knowledge around this subject.
I disagree here. It would be contribution to scientic knowledge if and only if it wasn't discovered before. My email was precisely about that: capitalizing on the knowledge that has already been discovered, to avoid making the same mistake them again. It would not matter for a small project, but this one is really ambitious. We are speaking of 40 years of work by a horde of talented and very knowledgeable people, so this isn't to be dismissed easily.
This thing is, my previous email was a bit abstract, because it were a review of the paper, not of the project itself. I should have made more examples to illustrate where the problem lies.
Let's start with a simple example, in English, with corresponding Wikidata entities in-between parenthesis. I'm also using pseudo-turtle notation with made up relationships.
France (Q142) is a country (Q6256).
<Q142> <rel_is> <Q6256> .
Creating the English sentence is straightforward with the naive approach presented in the paper.
What is the French equivalent?
La France est un pays.
More information is required in the abstract representation: the text generator needs to know about the gender of both nouns (France and pays). So we need to extend the model as such:
<Q142> <rel_gender> <Q1775415> .
<Q6256> <rel_gender> <Q499327> .
Fine! Now what about Chinese?
法國是一個國家。
What we have in the middle of the sentence is a classifier (個). The model needs the following update:
<Q499327> <rel_use_classifier> <Q63153> .
To handle these 3 languages, the model has already 3 additional triples just for accounting for linguistic facts occuring in these languages. Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages, and the world has about 6000 of them, each of them having particularities that must be taken into account. Fortunately they recoup themselves in-between languages. Nonetheless the World Atlas Language Structures (https://wals.info/chapter/s1) count 144 distinct language features. Some are related to speech, but this means there is probably something like a hundred features that must be taken into account in the data model to produce valid natural language sentence.
Note that in the Chinese example, there is also a number (一, one) showing up. This is a phenomenon that must be taken into account; and it's not always appearing when using 是 (to be). How complex the "lambda" system will be just to deal with this issue? Hint: very much. It also needs to be compatible with dozen of other phenomena.
Then each of those features require extensive and complete data. For French, the gender of every noun entity *must* be present, otherwise there is half a chance of producing a wrong sentence each time a noun entity is encountered. For Chinese and Japanese, classifier information must be present for all noun, in case one must be enumerated. Where does the project will get the data from? (we are speaking of millions of item, most not referenced in existing dictionaries) How will this be encoded? Those are real questions that must be answered.
Suppose now we have done the work for "renderers" in these three languages. They both use the more or less similar A X B structure where X is a verb meaning "to be".
What would be the Japanese equivalent?
The more natural structure would be like:
フランスは国(だ)。
What is a play here is a topicalization (Q63105) of France, followed by a predicate (it's a country). This is very different from the previous structure, which, not surprisingly enough, needs it's own representation. To make situation more difficult, the previous (A be B) structure can also exists in Japanese, but would lead to a totally different sentence if used.
The paper states that Figure 1 and 2 are examples that will be more complex in real life. Yet, the use of any existing formalism is dismissed, which mean all the situations I illustrated in this email will need to be dealt with in an ad hoc fashion. Moreover, changing formalism (be it ad hoc or not) will require to change every piece of code/data using it. This will happen everytime a language with unsupported feature(s) is added to the project. It's not hard to see how this will waste a huge amount of time and goodwill from involved people. The very code focussed tone of the paper, the english-centric approach used in the examples and the lack of references shows that the complexity of the task on the NLP front is not sufficiently conceptualized.
Best Regards,
Louis Lecailliez
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: NLP issues severely overlooked (Charles Matthews)
2. Use case: generation of short description (Jakob Voß)
3. Re: NLP issues severely overlooked (Amir E. Aharoni)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2020 14:05:09 +0100 (BST)
From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract
Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] NLP issues severely overlooked
Message-ID: <2126327926.39940.1593867909152(a)mail2.virginmedia.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
It is interesting to be on a list where one can hear about software issues, and then computational linguistic problems. I'm not an expert in either area.
I do have 17 years of varied Wikimedia experience (and I use my real name there).
> On 04 July 2020 at 12:25 Louis Lecailliez <louis.lecailliez(a)outlook.fr> wrote:
>
<snip>
> Nothing precise is said about linguistic resources in the AW paper except for "These function finally can call the lexicographic knowlegde stored in Wikidata.", which is not very convincing: first because Wiktionary projects themselves severely lacks content and structure for those who has some content at all, secondly since specialized NLP ressources are missing there too (note: I'm not familiar with Wikidata so I could be wrong, however I never saw it cited for the kind of NLP resources I'm talking about).
>
I can comment about this. Besides Wiktionary, there is the "lexeme" namespace of Wikidata. It is a relatively new part of Wikidata, dealing with verbal forms.
>To finish on a positive note, I would like to highlight the points I really like in the paper. First, its collaborative and open nature, like all Wikimedia projects, gives him a much higher chance of success than its predecessors.
It is worth saying, for context, that there is a certain style or philosophy coming from the wiki side: more precisely, from the wikis before Wikipedia. There is the slogan "what is the simplest thing that would actually work?" You might argue, plausibly, that Wikipedia at nearly 20 years old, shows that there is a bit more to engineering than that.
On the other hand, looking at Wikidata at seven years old, there is some point to the comment. It has a rather simple approach to linked structured data, compared to the Semantic Web environment. (Really, just write a very large piece of JSON and try to cope with it!) But the number of binary relations used (8K, if you count the "external links" handling) is now quite large, and has grown organically. The data modelling is in a sense primitive, sometimes non-existent. But the range of content handled really is encyclopedic. And in an area like scientific bibliography, at a scale of tens of millions of entities, the advantages of not much ontological fussiness begin to be seen.
Wikidata started as an index of all Wikipedia articles, and is now five times the size needed for that: a very enriched "index".
I suppose the NLP required to code up, for example, 50K chemistry articles about molecules, might be a problem that could be solved, leaving aside the general problems for the moment.
In any case, there is a certain approach, neither academic nor commercial, that comes with Wikimedia and its communities, and it will be interesting to see how the issues are addressed.
Charles Matthews (in Cambridge UK)
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2020 08:18:56 +0200
From: Jakob Voß <jakob.voss(a)gbv.de>
To: <abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Abstract-wikipedia] Use case: generation of short
description
Message-ID: <4403bbda-040b-6c89-9cb6-6540139250dc(a)gbv.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi,
I want to auto-generate disambiguation description for African
politicians to be added to Wikidata, e.g. from the country Mozambique
(Q1029) the following descriptions should be generated:
Mozambican politician (en)
Mosambikanischer Politiker (de)
politico mozambicano (it)
...
This could be extended to other professions. My questions:
- Can anyone point me to data sources where to best look up country
adjectives such as "Mozambican"?
- Where/how to best store the lexical information for best reuse with
other renderers
- If a create small renderers for this short descriptions, what
architecture do you prefer for best reuse?
My just-get-it-done solution would be a set of CSV files and a few lines
of Perl code, but maybe this use case can be aligned with Abstract
Wikidata to better learn about it.
Looking forward to collaborate,
Jakob
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2020 18:03:24 +0300
From: "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract
Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] NLP issues severely overlooked
Message-ID:
<CACtNa8t6kbWe21C980h1MxiWNfUp+0eDE82vPMjDUX2UCgb2gw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi,
Thanks a lot for the sources. I am not one of the people implementing
Wikilambda, but I am just very curious about it as a member of the wider
Wikimedia community. But there's a good chance that they will be useful to
people who do work on the implementation.
I will dare to add a little thought I have about it, however. It's possible
that the challenge of building a well-functioning natural language
generator is underestimated by the founders, and that they don't pay enough
attention to existing work (although, knowing Denny, there is a good chance
that he actually is aware of at least some of it). But there is something
that the wide Wikimedia community has that I'm not sure that the past
projects in this field did: The community itself. A big, worldwide, and
diverse group of passionate volunteers, who love the idea of spreading free
knowledge and who love their languages. Quite a lot of them also know some
programming, and in the past they proved unbelievably creative and
productive when writing code for Wikimedia projects as a community, in the
form of templates, modules, gadgets, bots, extensions, and other tools. I'm
quite sure that once the new tools become usable, this community will start
doing creative things again, and it will also start reporting bugs and
limitations.
So yes, while it's possible that along the way both the core developers and
the volunteer community will find all kinds of stumbling blocks, I'm pretty
sure that they will also have all kinds of surprising success stories. It's
also possible that the mere *finding* of these stumbling blocks by such a
big, diverse, open, and active community, will itself be a contribution to
the scientific knowledge around this subject. And don't underestimate the
"open" part—that's where we really shine. This won't be a theoretical work
in a lab, published in a paywalled and copyright-restricted academic
journal, but fully optimized for accessibility to everyone.
Yes, this whole email from me is incredibly naïve, but it's the same
attitude that got us to writing the biggest and most multilingual
encyclopedia in history, so maybe we can do something cool again :)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
בתאריך שבת, 4 ביולי 2020 ב-14:26 מאת Louis Lecailliez <
louis.lecailliez@outlook.fr>:
> Hello,
>
> my name is Louis Lecailliez, PhD student at Kyoto University in education
> technology. I'm a Computer Science and NLP graduate. One thing I do is
> working on language learner's knowledge modelling as graphs.
>
> The Abstract Wikipedia project is really interesting. There is however two
> very concerning issues I spotted when reading the associated paper draft (
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733). The following email could be read as
> negative, but please don't take it as such: my purpose is to avoid spending
> people efforts and money for things that can (need to!) be fixed upfront.
>
> 1. Issues with NLP
>
> The main issue is that the difficulty of the NLP task of generating
> natural text from an abstract representation is severely overlooked. This
> stems from the other main problem: the paper is not based on the decades of
> previous work in that space.
>
> As I understand it, the main value proposition of Abstract Wikipedia (AW)
> is a computer representation of encyclopedic knowledge that can be
> projected into different existing natural languages, with the goal of
> supporting a huge number of them. Plus, an editor to make this happen
> easily.
>
> This is in fact surprisingly extremely close to what the Universal
> Networking Language (UNL) project, which started 20 years ago, aims to do.
> UNL provides a language agnostic representation of text that uses
> hypergraph. Software (called EnConverter) produce UNL graphs from natural
> text in a given language. Another kind of software called DeConverter do
> the reverse, that is producing natural text from the abstract
> representation. This is exactly the same function of the "renderers" in the
> AW paper. The way of doing it is also similar: by applying successive
> transformations until the final text string is produced. In general, that
> kind of abstract meaning representation is called an Interlingua, and is
> widely used in Machine Translation (MT) systems.
>
> Disregarding two decades of work, in the UNL case, on the same problem
> space (rule-based machine translation, here from an abstract language as
> fixed source language), which was itself based on few other decades of
> work, doesn't seem to be a wise move to start a new project. For a start,
> the graph representation used in the AW will likely not be expressive
> enough to encode linguistic knowledge; this is why UNL uses hypergraphs
> instead of graphs.
>
> The problem is glaring when looking at the references list: the list is
> bloated with irrelevant references (such as those to programming languages
> [27, 37, 41, 77], Turing completeness being the worst offender [11, 17, 23,
> ...]) while containing only two references [7, 85] to the really hard part
> of the project: generating natural language from the abstract
> representation. There are few more relevant references about natural
> language generation, but this isn't enough.
>
> Interestingly, [85] is an UNL paper, but not the main one. Moreover, it is
> cited in Section 9 "Opening future research". This should be instead placed
> in a "Previous work" section which is missing from the paper.
>
> To fill a part of this section yet to be written, I propose the following
> references:
> [*1] Uchida, H., Zhu, M., & Della Senta, T. (1999). A gift for a
> millennium. IAS/UNU, Tokyo.
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hiroshi_Uchida2/publication/239328725_…
> [*2] Wang-Ju Tsai (2004) La coédition langue-UNL pour partager la révision
> entre langues d'un document multilingue. [Language-UNL coedition to share
> revisions in a multilingual document] Thèse de doctorat. Grenoble.
>
> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b030/ea4662e393657b9a134c006ca5b08e8a23b3.…
> [3*] Boitet, C., & Tsai, W. J. (2002). La coédition langue<—> UNL pour
> partager la révision entre les langues d'un document multilingue: un
> concept unificateur. Proc. TALN-02, Nancy, 22-26.
>
> http://www.afcp-parole.org/doc/Archives_JEP/2002_XXIVe_JEP_Nancy/talnrecita…
> [4*] Tomokiyo, M., Mangeot, M., & Boitet, C. (2019). Development of a
> classifiers/quantifiers dictionary towards French-Japanese MT. arXiv
> preprint arXiv:1902.08061.
> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.08061.pdf
> [5*] Boguslavsky, I. (2005). Some controversial issues of UNL: Linguistic
> aspects. Research on Computer Science, 12, 77-100.
>
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.212.2058&rep=rep1&…
> [6*] Boitet, C. (2002). A rationale for using UNL as an interlingua and
> more in various domains. In Proc. LREC-02 First International Workshop on
> UNL, other Interlinguas, and their Applications, Las Palmas (pp. 26-31).
> https://www.cicling.org/2005/unl-book/Papers/003.pdf
> [7*] Dhanabalan, T., & Geetha, T. V. (2003, December). UNL deconverter for
> Tamil. In International Conference on the Convergences of Knowledge,
> Culture, Language and Information Technologies.
> http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/convergence03/all%20data/paper%20032-372.pdf
> [8*] Singh, S., Dalal, M., Vachhani, V., Bhattacharyya, P., & Damani, O.
> P. (2007). Hindi generation from Interlingua (UNL). Machine Translation
> Summit XI.
>
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.78.979&rep=rep1&ty…
> [9*] Banarescu, L., Bonial, C., Cai, S., Georgescu, M., Griffitt, K.,
> Hermjakob, U., ... & Schneider, N. (2013, August). Abstract meaning
> representation for sembanking. In Proceedings of the 7th linguistic
> annotation workshop and interoperability with discourse (pp. 178-186).
> https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W13-2322.pdf
> [10*] Berment, V., & Boitet, C. (2012). Heloise—An Ariane-G5 Compatible
> Rnvironment for Developing Expert MT Systems Online. In Proceedings of
> COLING 2012: Demonstration Papers (pp. 9-16).
> https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C12-3002.pdf
> [11*] Berment, V. (2005). Online Translation Services for the Lao
> Language. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Lao
> Studies. De Kalb, Illinois, USA (pp. 1-11).
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vincent_Berment/publication/242140227_…
>
> [*1] is the paper that describes UNL. [2*] is a doctoral thesis discussing
> a core problem AW is trying to address too. [3*] is a short paper done in
> the scope of [2*], even if you don't understand French you can have a look
> at the figures: two of them are about an editor similar in principe to what
> AW wants to incorporate.
> [5*] Insights about UNL expressivity issues, 10 years after the project's
> start. [6*] More UNL, with short history and context in which it is used.
>
> [4*] shows how deep natural language conversion goes: this paper addresses
> the issue of classifiers in French and Japanese. This is just one
> linguistic issue and there are dozens if not hundreds of such. An important
> point is that both of the languages involved need to be taken into account
> when modelling the abstract encoding, otherwise too much information is
> lost for producing a correct output.
>
> [7*] [8*] are very valuable examples of real world deconverter systems for
> UNL. As it's visible on [7*]'s Figure 1 and [8*]'s Figure 2, the process is
> *way* more complicated than a single "renderers" box. Moreover, there are
> very distinct identifiable steps, informed by linguistics. The AW does not
> describe any such structuration of natural text generation processing
> steps, everything is supposed to be happening in some unstructured "lambda"
> system. Also missing are the specialized resources (UNL-Hindi dictionary,
> Tamil Word dictionary, co-occurrence dictionary, etc.) required for the
> task. Nothing precise is said about linguistic resources in the AW paper
> except for "These function finally can call the lexicographic knowlegde
> stored in Wikidata.", which is not very convincing: first because
> Wiktionary projects themselves severely lacks content and structure for
> those who has some content at all, secondly since specialized NLP
> ressources are missing there too (note: I'm not familiar with Wikidata so I
> could be wrong, however I never saw it cited for the kind of NLP resources
> I'm talking about).
>
> [10*] is a translation system built with "specialised languages for
> linguistic programming (SLLPs)" which is the service Wikilambda is supposed
> to provide for Abstract Wikipedia. [11*] gives the estimation of 2500 hours
> for the development (by a specialist) of three linguistic modules for Lao
> processing.
>
> So, in regard to the difficulty of the task, and previous work in the
> literature, the AW paper does not provide any convincing evidence that the
> technology on which it is supposed to be built can even reach the
> state-of-art. Dismissing every existing formal and software systems on the
> ground of "no consensus commiting to any specific linguistic theory" is not
> gonna work: this will result in ad hoc implementation-driven formalism that
> will have hard time fullfilling its goal.
> The NLP part (generating sentences from abstract representation) is the
> hardest of the project, yet it’s by far the least convincing one. "Abstract
> Wikipedia is indeed firmly within this tradition, and in preparation for
> this project we studied numerous predecessors." I would like to believe so,
> but the lack of corresponding reference as well as lack of previous work
> section tends to prove the contrary.
>
> While I can't advice for a switch to UNL, as I'm not specialist of it, it
> would be smart to capitalize on the work done on it by highly skilled (PhD
> level) individuals. As the UNL system is built on hypergraphs, it probably
> could be made interoperable easily with RDF knowledge graphs if named
> graphs are used. By having a UNL/RDF specification (yet to be written), the
> vision exposed in the AW paper may be reached sooner by reusing existing
> software (we are speaking of thousands man-year of work as per [11*]), and
> almost as importantly, an existing formalism that has been "debugged" for
> decades. There are probably other systems I'm unaware of that are worth
> investigating too, some like [9*] having more specialized usage. In any
> case, there is a strong need to back the paper and the project on the
> existing (huge) literature.
>
> 2. Other issues
>
> "In order to evaluate a function call, an evaluator can choose from a
> multitude of backends: it may evaluate the function
> call in the browser, in the cloud, on the servers of the Wikimedia
> Foundation, on a distributed peer-to-peer evaluation
> platform, or natively on the user’s machine in a dedicated hosting
> runtime, which could be a mobile app or a server on the
> user’s computer."
>
> This part is big technical creep. There is no reason to turn the project
> into a distributed heterogenous computing platform with a dedicated
> runtime, which could be a research project on its own, when the stated goal
> is to provide abstract multilingual encyclopedic content. All the
> computation can be done on servers (cloud is servers too) and cached. This
> is way easier to implement, test and deliver than to implement 10 different
> backends with various progress in implementation, incompatibilities and
> runtime characteristics.
>
> The paper presents AW as sitting on top on WL. Both are big projects.
> Sitting a big project on top of another one is really risky, as it means a
> significant milestone must first be reached in the dependency (here WL),
> which would likely took some years, before even starting the work on the
> other project. AW can be realised with current tools and engineering
> practices.
>
> "One obstacle in the democratization of programming has been that almost
> every programming language requires first to learn some basic English."
>
> This strong affirmation needs to be sourced. Programming languages, save
> for a few keywords, doesn't rely much on English. The vast insuccess of
> localized version of programming languages (such as French Basic) as well
> as the heavy use of existing programming language in countries that doesn't
> even use the Latin alphabet (China, Russia) tends to prove that English is
> not all a bottleneck for the democratization of programming. [53] is cited
> later in the paper but is a pop-linguistic article from an online
> newspaper, not an academic article.
>
> 3. Final words
>
> To finish on a positive note, I would like to highlight the points I
> really like in the paper. First, its collaborative and open nature, like
> all Wikimedia projects, gives him a much higher chance of success than its
> predecessors. If UNL is not too well-known, it’s not because it didn't
> yield research achievements, but because one selected institution per
> language is working on it and keep the resources and software within the
> lab walls. Secondly, there are some very welcome out-of-scope features:
> conversion from natural language, restriction to encyclopedic style text.
> This will allow for more focused effort towards the end goal, making it
> more achievable. And finally, the choice to go with symbolic/rule-based
> system with a touch of other ML where useful. This is, as said in the
> paper, a big win for explainability and using human contributions to build
> the system. This will also keep the computing cost to a more sane baseline
> than what the current deep learning models require.
>
> I think the project can succeed thanks to its openess, yet there is are
> real dangers visible in the paper: on the NLP side to reinvent a wheel that
> took 40 years to build, and on the technical side to lose time and effort
> on a project not required per se for AW to be build.
>
> As I spend a significant time (~10 hours) gathering references and writing
> this email (which is 5 pages long in Word), I would like to be mentioned as
> co-author in the final paper if any idea or references presented here is
> used in it.
>
> Best regards,
> Louis Lecailliez
>
> PS:
> 4. Typos
> * "These two projects will considerably expand the capabilities of the
> Wikimedia platform to enable every single human being to freely share share
> in the sum of all knowledge." => duplicate share
> * "The content is than turned into" => The content is then turned into
> * "[26] Charles J Fillmore, Russell Lee-Goldman, and Russell Rhodes. The
> framenet constructicon. Sign-based construction grammar, pages 309–372,
> 2012." => The framenet construction
> * "These function finally can call the lexicographic knowlegde stored in
> Wikidata." => These function finally can call the lexicographic knowledge
> stored in Wikidata
> * "[102] George Kinsley Zipf. Human Behavior and the Pirnciple of Least
> Effort. Addison-Wesley, 1949." => [102] George Kinsley Zipf. Human Behavior
> and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, 1949.
> * "Allowing the individual language Wikipedias to call Wikilambda has an
> addtional benefit." => Allowing the individual language Wikipedias to call
> Wikilambda has an additional benefit.
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