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118. Angela Fan - Generating Wikipedia articles with AI

118. Angela Fan - Generating Wikipedia articles with AI

Author: The TDS team April 6, 2022 Duration: 51:44
Towards Data Science
Technology

Generating well-referenced and accurate Wikipedia articles has always been an important problem: Wikipedia has essentially become the Internet's encyclopedia of record, and hundreds of millions of people use it do understand the world.

But over the last decade Wikipedia has also become a critical source of training data for data-hungry text generation models. As a result, any shortcomings in Wikipedia’s content are at risk of being amplified by the text generation tools of the future. If one type of topic or person is chronically under-represented in Wikipedia’s corpus, we can expect generative text models to mirror — or even amplify — that under-representation in their outputs.

Through that lens, the project of Wikipedia article generation is about much more than it seems — it’s quite literally about setting the scene for the language generation systems of the future, and empowering humans to guide those systems in more robust ways.

That’s why I wanted to talk to Meta AI researcher Angela Fan, whose latest project is focused on generating reliable, accurate, and structured Wikipedia articles. She joined me to talk about her work, the implications of high-quality long-form text generation, and the future of human/AI collaboration on this episode of the TDS podcast.

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Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

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Chapters:

  • 1:45 Journey into Meta AI
  • 5:45 Transition to Wikipedia
  • 11:30 How articles are generated
  • 18:00 Quality of text
  • 21:30 Accuracy metrics
  • 25:30 Risk of hallucinated facts
  • 30:45 Keeping up with changes
  • 36:15 UI/UX problems
  • 45:00 Technical cause of gender imbalance
  • 51:00 Wrap-up

While the active production of Towards Data Science has concluded, its archive remains a vital resource. Created by The TDS team, this collection captures a specific moment in the rapid evolution of data science and artificial intelligence. Each conversation pulls you directly into the room with leading researchers and practitioners who were shaping the tools and theories of their time. The discussions are not abstract lectures; they are grounded explorations of real-world problems, ethical dilemmas, and technical challenges that defined the field's trajectory. You'll hear experts dissect the implications of their work, from algorithmic fairness to the practicalities of deploying models at scale. This podcast served as a forum for nuanced debate, where complex ideas were unpacked with clarity and depth. Listening now offers a unique historical perspective, a chance to understand the foundational conversations that continue to influence where technology is headed next. The archive of Towards Data Science stands as a substantive record of insight, preserving the voices and questions from the forefront of a digital revolution.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

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Towards Data Science
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