Wikipedia : Wikipedia Signpost/2024-09-26/Recent research

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2024-10-02 19:00:09

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"PaperQA2, a frontier language model agent optimized for improved factuality, [which] matches or exceeds subject matter expert performance on three realistic [research] literature research tasks. PaperQA2 writes cited, Wikipedia-style summaries of scientific topics that are significantly more accurate than existing, human-written Wikipedia articles."

It was published by "FutureHouse", a San-Francisco-based nonprofit working on "Automating scientific discovery" (with a focus on biology). FutureHouse was launched last year with funding from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (at which time it was anticipated it would spend about $20 million by the end of 2024). Generating Wikipedia-like articles about science topics is only one of the applications of "PaperQA2, FutureHouse's scientific RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] system", which is designed to aid researchers. (For example, FutureHouse also recently launched a website called "Has Anyone", described as a "minimalist AI tool to search if anyone has ever researched a given topic.")

In more detail, the researchers "engineered a system called WikiCrow, which generates cited Wikipedia-style articles about human protein-coding genes by combining several PaperQA2 calls on topics such as the structure, function, interactions, and clinical significance of the gene." Each call contributes a section of the resulting article (somewhat similar to another recent system, see our review: "STORM: AI agents role-play as 'Wikipedia editors' and 'experts' to create Wikipedia-like articles"). The prompts include the instruction to "Write in the style of a Wikipedia article, with concise sentences and coherent paragraphs".