A team of US researchers has developed an automated system that corrects sentences and updates information on Wikipedia, while keeping the language similar to how humans write and edit.
Wikipedia is a digital multilingual encyclopedia that can be edited by any user. The articles published on Wikipedia are available to all people who have Internet access, reported the German News Agency.
Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of correction and editing on different levels such as language mistakes, numbers, data, and locations. According to the Tech Xplore website, the new automated system developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) can reduce the time and effort spent by human editors who now do the task manually.
The idea is that humans would type into an interface an unstructured sentence with updated information, without needing to worry about style or grammar. The system would then search Wikipedia, locate the appropriate page and outdated sentence, and rewrite it in a humanlike fashion.
The Tech Xplore website cited Darsh Shah, researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, saying "There are so many updates constantly needed to Wikipedia articles. It would be beneficial to automatically modify the articles, with little to no human intervention."
"Instead of hundreds of people working on modifying each Wikipedia article, then you'll only need a few, because the model is helping or doing it automatically," he added.
In the future, the researchers say, there's potential to build a fully automated system that identifies and uses the latest information from around the web to produce rewritten sentences in corresponding Wikipedia articles without human intervention.
