It is exciting that we will have the ability to do inferences; I think that inference engines for Wikidata knowledgebases are a good idea.

Individual rules should be considered in contexts. In my opinion, a good policy is for privileged users (e.g. admins) to be able to activate and deactivate individual rules, e.g. in accordance with community deliberation.

I find interesting that natural language generation could be useful for generating explanations of reasoning processes and derivations to readers and that these explanations of derivations could be hyperlinked-to as referenced materials in automatically-generated articles.

From: Samuel Klein
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2020 10:57 AM
To: General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Wikidata Statement Provenance, Automated Reasoning, and Natural Language Generation

I appreciate this extension.  

I hope any sort of inference will be on the table for someone to propose via an appropriate function, while others could debate the range of contexts in which a) that function would have the desired result with appropriate false ±, and b) that function would be a socially appropriate source

🌍🌏🌎🌑

On Thu., Jul. 16, 2020, 12:48 a.m. Denny Vrandečić, <dvrandecic@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Extend "I don't think that there is ever a need for the system to try to infer that Douglas Adams is a Science Fiction author." with "I don't think that there is ever a need for the system to try to infer that Douglas Adams is a Science Fiction author when creating text for the Wikipedia article for Douglas Adams." There might obviously be other use cases where such a capability is needed.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 9:45 PM Denny Vrandečić <dvrandecic@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Oh, yes, I certainly want us to tackle calendars (and quantities, for that matter) in Wikidata. This is something I left in a state I wasn't perfectly happy yet, and I would like to help improve that, and Wikilambda will offer an option for that (by providing a library of functions to deal with calendars and quantities, specifically).

Regarding the reasoning and inferences: I certainly expect and hope that we will be implementing such rules as envisioned by Adam in Wikilambda, and I equally expect that we won't use them much in Abstract Wikipedia for the reasons Charles mentioned.

There's an additional reason I see that would make it less likely to use this kind of inference in Abstract Wikipedia, which is that I pretty much expect that we as contributors will have rather fine-grained control of what is stated in the article. I.e. I don't think that there is ever a need for the system to try to infer that Douglas Adams is a Science Fiction author. The abstract article for Doulas Adams will likely start with a sentence such as "Douglas Adams was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist." Now, this is not a full list of all the occupations of Douglas Adams - Wikidata also lists children's writer and playwright, he also was an environmental conservationist, a computer game author, and probably much more. Now, to choose the right selection of occupations for this first sentence, and whether to additionally infer science fiction author, and then also to order this list - I think, that might be rather a challenge.

Instead I would think that the author creating this first sentence can explicitly set and choose which occupations to list in which order, and which to drop. The list may or may not vibe with what is stated in Wikidata, and that's OK.

We will have the possibility to query Wikidata for certain things, and we will have the ability to do inferences, but I expect these superpowers to be used in very measured way, and mostly for the longer tail of content. But all of these are editorial decisions.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 3:02 AM Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia <abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 15 July 2020 at 10:45 Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com> wrote:

The example about inferring that Douglas Adams [1] was a science fiction writer from some of his works being science fiction may have muddied the waters.

The example from the Wikidata reasoning project [2] may be more useful for discussion. “The spouse (P26) of Douglas Adams (Q42) was Jane Belson (Q14623681). Clearly, this means that, conversely, the spouse (P26) of Jane Belson (Q14623681) was Douglas Adams (Q42). This is a simple example of a case where one statement (about Jane Belson (Q14623681)) can be inferred from another statement (about Douglas Adams (Q42)).”

Yes, inference from family relationships to others is not, in my view, a concern under WP:SYNTH. Inferences in temporal logic likewise.

I have commented elsewhere (in tweets) on the ability of Wikidata to formalise the quite complex way historians actually qualify dates. Correct propagation of the temporal logic of scholarly sources into AW format might be a good test case of some of these ideas. 

Wikidata has not yet tackled the plethora of calendars currently in use; so I would be interested to see if AW could contribute in this direction, code-wise.

These are examples of areas that seem to me fruitful.

Charles

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