More than 100,000 volunteer human editors contribute to the construction and maintenance of a large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles on Wikipedia, however, its authentication is still under question as the information provided by Wikipedia is not always reliable. To tackle the issue, the Meta AI team has created a dataset of over 134 million web pages to build a citation-checker AI called SIDE. Meta said in a blog post; “Building on Meta AI’s research and advancements, we’ve developed the first model capable of automatically scanning hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check whether they truly support the corresponding claims.”
How Citation-checker AI (SIDE) Works?
SIDE works by analyzing a Wikipedia citation and determining whether it’s appropriate. Moreover, it can also find new sources for information already published on Wikipedia. Meta explained it using the ‘Blackfoot Confederacy’ example.
If a user scrolls to the bottom of this Wiki article, they will learn that Joe Hipp was the first Native American to compete for the WBA World Heavyweight Title—a 100% authentic fact. But, here’s the problem; whoever wrote this fact cited a source that has nothing to do with Joe Hipp or the Blackfeet Tribe. In this case, Wikipedia editors failed to check the authenticity of a citation (the problem has since been fixed). But if the editors had SIDE, they could have caught the bad citation early and they wouldn’t need to look for a new citation, as SIDE would automatically suggest one.
AI that can Make Sense of The Real World
According to Meta, the AI models will bolster the quality of knowledge on Wikipedia, helping to preserve the accuracy of a resource that virtually everyone uses. According to the company; “While we can’t yet design a computer system that has a human-level comprehension of language, our research creates smarter, more flexible algorithms. This improvement will only become more important as we rely on computers to interpret the surging volume of text citations generated each day.”
