Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, September
21, 2016 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 (UTC).
YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTDkVeqjw80
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#September_2016>.
This month's showcase includes.
Finding News Citations for WikipediaBy *Besnik Fetahu
<http://www.l3s.de/~fetahu/> (Leibniz University of Hannover)*An important
editing policy in Wikipedia is to provide citations for added statements in
Wikipedia pages, where statements can be arbitrary pieces of text, ranging
from a sentence to a paragraph. In many cases citations are either outdated
or missing altogether. In this work we address the problem of finding and
updating news citations for statements in entity pages. We propose a two-
stage supervised approach for this problem. In the first step, we construct
a classifier to find out whether statements need a news citation or other
kinds of citations (web, book, journal, etc.). In the second step, we
develop a news citation algorithm for Wikipedia statements, which
recommends appropriate citations from a given news collection. Apart from
IR techniques that use the statement to query the news collection, we also
formalize three properties of an appropriate citation, namely: (i) the
citation should entail the Wikipedia statement, (ii) the statement should
be central to the citation, and (iii) the citation should be from an
authoritative source. We perform an extensive evaluation of both steps,
using 20 million articles from a real-world news collection. Our results
are quite promising, and show that we can perform this task with high
precision and at scale.
Designing and Building Online Discussion SystemsBy *Amy X. Zhang
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/> (MIT)*Today, conversations are
everywhere on the Internet and come in many different forms. However, there
are still many problems with discussion interfaces today. In my talk, I
will first give an overview of some of the problems with discussion
systems, including difficulty dealing with large scales, which exacerbates
additional problems with navigating deep threads containing lots of
back-and-forth and getting an overall summary of a discussion. Other
problems include dealing with moderation and harassment in discussion
systems and gaining control over filtering, customization, and means of
access. Then I will focus on a few projects I am working on in this space
now. The first is Wikum, a system I developed to allow users to
collaboratively generate a wiki-like summary from threaded discussion. The
second, which I have just begun, is exploring the design space of
presentation and navigation of threaded discussion. I will next discuss
Murmur, a mailing list hybrid system we have built to implement and test
ideas around filtering, customization, and flexibility of access, as well
as combating harassment. Finally, I'll wrap up with what I am working on at
Google Research this summer: developing a taxonomy to describe online forum
discussion and using this information to extract meaningful content useful
for search, summarization of discussions, and characterization of
communities.
Hope to see you there!
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org