Announcing Citation Detective, a public dataset of sentences missing citations - Cloud

7 Mar 2020

Hi all,

I’m happy to announce the outcome of an Outreachy internship
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T233707> that I’m finishing up. It is a
new tool and public dataset named Citation Detective which tool developers
and researchers can now use for their projects.

Citation Detective <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Citation_Detective>
contains sentences that have been identified as needing a citation using a
machine learning-based classifier published earlier last year
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11116.pdf> by WMF researchers and
collaborators. As part of Outreachy, I developed a tool
<https://github.com/AikoChou/citationdetective> (hosted on Toolforge
<https://tools.wmflabs.org>) to run through Wikipedia and extract
high-scoring sentences along with contextual information.

As an example use case for this data, I also created a proof of concept for
integrating Citation Detective and Citation Hunt
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt>. Check out my prototype Citation
Hunt <https://tools.wmflabs.org/aiko-citationhunt>, which uses Citation
Detective to import sentences that would not normally be featured in
Citation Hunt. The repository for that is here
<https://github.com/AikoChou/citationhunt>.

This dataset currently includes sentences from ~120,000 randomly selected
articles from the English Wikipedia. In future work, we hope to expand this
to more language Wikipedia projects and a greater number of articles. It is
also possible to expand the database to contain more fields in a future
version according to feedback from tool developers and researchers. More
use cases for this type of data were identified in a design research project
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Identification_of_Unsourced_Statements/API_design_research>
conducted last year by Jonathan Morgan.

You can find more information in our Wiki Workshop submission
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citation_Detective_WikiWorkshop2020.pdf>
and in my blog <https://rollingmist.home.blog/> which documented the whole
journey.

Thank you very much!

Kind regard,
Aiko