AI learns to help Wikipedia find better citations
On this day in 2023, researchers mostly from FAIR at Meta, with collaborators including Samaya AI and University College London, published SIDE in Nature Machine Intelligence. Wikipedia requires claims to be backed by citations, and keeping them reliable is an ongoing challenge. SIDE pairs an information retrieval system with a language model trained on Wikipedia references to spot citations unlikely to support their claims and suggest better sources from the web. For the 10 percent of citations it rated most likely unverifiable, people preferred its alternatives 70 percent of the time. In a demo with English Wikipedia users, its first pick was preferred twice as often as the existing citation, an early sign of AI helping people improve shared knowledge.