On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 3:43 AM, Dan Garry <dgarry@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I've seen arguments on both sides here. Some say automatically generated
> descriptions are not good enough. Some say they are. Why don't we gather
> some data on this and use that to decide what's right? :-)
Please do. Especially pay attention to languages other than English
though. Because even if we get algorithms to write good descriptions
for English are we going to do the same for all the other languages?
Especially those where grammar is tricky and Wikidata doesn't even
have the necessary information to make the grammar right? The other
tricky side is determining why something is actually notable. That's
not a trivial thing to determine based on the data we have.
And you know very well that (AFAIK) I am the only one who actually worked on this, in a tiny fraction of my spare time, and I only speak German and English.
The /real/ questions here are:
1. The language that are actually implemented, are they returning descriptions that are good/OK/bad/plain wrong
2. What could be achieved, on the existing or similar infrastructure, in a short period of time, if we drive to get code snippets (or equivalent) for other languages from volunteers?
3. What could be achieved, medium/long term, if we had a proper linguist to work on the problem? Or someone who has worked with multi-language text generation before?
I've just been winging it so far. Current auto-descriptions are not the best we can do. They are, frankly, the WORST we can do. This is a starting point, not the end product.