Thanks, Charles. That's a very fine piece of work! And so relevant, not just to the quiz use case but to the whole of the NLG side of our project. I wonder whether there have been any further developments. I don't see any links to that pdf on Google. I've put the link in our to-do list[1].
There's some good stuff in there about performance as well as data quality, which are both areas we should certainly be looking into.
On the question of data structure, I guess it rather depends where you are sitting. The essence of my quiZiverse idea is that the consumer handles a relatively small dataset (client side) because WMF servers are running the functions. Essentially, the result is a pretty manageable structured object (in the more collaborative mode, perhaps a ZObject) and it can be grown iteratively. Given those assumptions, it hardly matters which formats are desired as inputs to (for consumption within) an actual quiz.
Since I was envisaging passing out "links" that are essentially a pre-written call back to the function with different arguments, those potential call-backs could be queued for processing server-side, so that the eventual call-back is referencing a freshly minted structured object (with a fairly limited shelf-life, unless it's a refresh of a pre-existing ZObject). So, again, lots of options to explore on the technical side.
I'm inclined to disagree with you on the question of hints, though. The structure I was envisaging is very straightforward; the "distractor" is an answer to some other question, so the "hint" is just that question phrased as a statement. It could be more complicated, but it should still be a fairly simple connection to the next function call. Of course, "where next?" may depend on whether the question was answered correctly, or there might be a choice to be made, but I think that would still resolve quite simply into a single next call. The functionality is an interactive "crawler" [2], at the end of the day, with each "next step" deferred until required or pre-prepared if responsiveness might be an issue.
Keep it simple; iterate collaboratively; make it great!
Best regards, Al. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/ Related_and_previous_work/Natural_language_generation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Related_and_previous_work/Natural_language_generation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
On Monday, 3 August 2020, abstract-wikipedia-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Comprehension questions (Charles Matthews)
- Natural Language and Mathematics Generation (Adam Sobieski)
- Re: Natural Language and Mathematics Generation (Charles Matthews)
- Loose notes (Andy)
Message: 1 Date: Sun, 2 Aug 2020 17:22:11 +0100 (BST) From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia@lists.wiki media.org> Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Comprehension questions Message-ID: 29359200.234452.1596385332016@mail2.virginmedia.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
On 02 August 2020 at 16:16 Grounder UK grounderuk@gmail.com wrote:
But we don't just want the answer, we want a quiz! Equally, maybe wedon't just want the question and the answer, we want some wrong answers and some tips.
It goes back to 2016, just to generate questions from Wikidata:
https://pub.tik.ee.ethz.ch/students/2016-FS/BA-2016-03.pdf
Technically the incorrect answers in multiple choice are called "distractors". Clearly this is a rather simple data structure to handle. Hints assume quite a bit more.
At the beginning of 2017, I decided to take seriously the suggestion (from Magnus Manske) that questions should be treated as structured data. I even suggested Wikidata should have a namespace for them (this didn't go down well). A road not taken then, and just as the Comprende! tool was finished I got diverted into a Wikimedian in Residence position. So much for that.
Anyone, one take on this is that AW output might be some kind of structured data, rather than the sectioned prose (+media files and tables and templated data) familiar from Wikipedia.
By the way, mathematics in wikitext has traditionally been a threefold mix of approaches (HTML, png, LaTex): not an elegant solution.
Charles