WikiBio

Motivation

The motivation for our project was to explore the possibilities of natural-language generation in the context of biography generation. It is easy to get structural data from the Wikidata pages, but not all the Wikidata pages have a corresponding Wikipedia page. This project will showcase how we can use the structural data from the Wikidata pages to generate realistic biographies in the Wikipedia pages format.

Project plan

Week	Dates	Goals	Result
1	8.10-15.10	Exploring data souces	Selected Wikipedia + Wikidata
2	15.10-22.10	Matching textual and structural data	Wikipedia articles matched with wikidata
3	22.10-29.10	First trained model prototype	GPT-2 was trained on english data
4	29.10-5.11	Acknowledge major modelling problems	GPT-2 was trained in Italian, issues with Wikipedia pages completion and Italian model performances
5	5.11-12.11	Code clean up, midterm preparation	Improved sparql request
6	12.11-19.11	Try with XLNet model, more input data, explore evaluation methods	Worse results with XLNet (even with more input data), Subjective quality assessment and Bleu/Gleu methods
7	19.11-26.11	Start evaluation surveys and automatic evaluation, improve GPT-2 input data	Survey started, introduced full-article generation with sections
8	26.11-3.12	Productionalization, finish evaluation	Created wikibio.mbien.pl to present our results and started working on API for page uploads
9	3.12-10.12	Productionalization, evaluation analysis	Finished the wikipage, uploaded code and prepared the presentation slides
10	10.12-16.12	Final Presentation	Who knows?

Data sources

The schema of data acquisition step

In this project, we made use of two different data sources: Wikidata and Wikipedia

Wikidata

Wikidata was used to gather the structured information about the people who lived in the Republic of Venice. To gather this data from wikidata, a customizable SPARQL query is used on the official wikidata SPARQL API. Only two strict constraints were set for data filtering:

• Instance of (wdt:P31), human (wd:Q5)
• Citizenship (wdt:P27), Republic of Venice (wd:Q4948)

Optionally, following data was also gathered - we used it for generation whenever they existed in the data

• ID of the object in the wikidata
• itemLabel (wikibase:label) - generally either equal to the person's full name, or the wikidata ID
• itemDescription (schema:description) - short, generally two-word, description of the person
• birth year (wdt:P569)
• death year (wdt:P570)
• profession (wdt:P106)
• last name (wdt:P734)
• first name (wdt:P735)
• link to picture in commons (wdt:P18)

Wikipedia

Wikipedia was used to match the wikidata entries with the unstructured text of the article about that person. The "Wikipedia" package for python was used to find the matching pairs and then to extract the Wikipedia articles matching the entries.

Generation methods

The output of the above data sources is prepared jointly in the following manner:

• All the structured entries are transformed to text, by putting the custom control token in front of them and then concatenating them together
• The resulting text is the training sample for the model

We considered two language model architectures: XLNet and GPT-2. The comparison of the models and reason of selection of GPT-2 is described below

XLNet

XLNet is a late-2019 bi-directional language model, mostly used for tasks like sentiment analysis, classification and word correction. However, it was interesting for us due to its possibility to train on and generate text samples of virtually infinite length.

Pros:

• variable text length
• modern architecture

Cons:

• bi-directionality is not of much use here and takes more memory
• considerably lower performance on text generation tasks than GPT-2

Finally, our tests has shown that we should not consider XLNet for our biography generation effort, for a number of reasons:

• there is no text sample length limit, but the GPU RAM is not, which makes the limitation to ~1500 tokens required anyway
• the model performs poorly with short inputs
• the text is gramatically correct but the coherence with semistructured data is very bad, supposedly due to bi-directional nature of the model

GPT-2

GPT-2 is an early-2019 Causal (left-to-right) Language Model. It it widely used for language modeling for text generation, and as such it was perceived as the best shot to get the decent language modeling performance.

Pros:

• modern architecture
• left-to-right: memory-efficient
• widely used for text generation

Cons:

• fixed 1024 tokens context frame

The model performed well to understand the semi-structured input based on the underlying wikidata. It allowed generating short, but consistent biographies.

Example generation output

• Input: <|start|> Marco Polo <|description|> Painter <|professions|> Painter, Writer <|birth|> 1720 <|death|> 1793 <|summary|>
• Output: Marco Polo (1720 – 1793) was a German painter of a distinguished life of high quality. In 1740 he was the first to paint in an Italian Renaissance style. He served as the painter of Giovanni Venez in Venice; his brother was Giovanni Magnan and daughter was a painter of his own time, Marco Polo. During his career he collaborated with the great Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Gugliati in the work for the Porte della Prudina, which was published in 1714. After his death, he would leave his paintings at Venice for the Palace of Santa Martina.

Productionalization

The flowchart of automatic biography generation pipeline

Platform

To serve the generated biographies, we created the MediaWiki website: https://wikibio.mbien.pl/ The platform was based on the private server, running the docker-compose stack. The used containers were:

• mediawiki 1.35 from https://hub.docker.com/_/mediawiki
• mariadb 10.5 from https://hub.docker.com/_/mariadb

The server was also running traefik 1.7 as an ingress gateway and TLS terminator.

Functionalities such as Infobox:Person, required significant manual modifications to the vanilla MediaWiki installation. To enable this functionality, it was required to perform all the operations described in the following tutorial: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Importing_Wikipedia_infoboxes_tutorial. Finally, the logos and favicons were replaced with the coat of arms of Republic of Venice, to give the platform more pleasant look.

Automatic generation pipeline

The final generation pipeline was a complex, multi-phase operation. While the survey-based evaluation of our model was meant to show the overall performance, here we wanted to get only the well-conditioned biographies, ready to be served to the users. The overall pipeline is visible in the following diagram, with details explained in the further subsections

Post-processing wikidata

In general, itemLabel extracted from the wikidata was meant to contain the person full name. However, it was not always the case. Some labels contained the wikidata ID of the entry. These samples were found, and, whenever possible, their labels were replaced with the first and last name acquired via the data optional fields. If those fields were not existing either, the sample was dropped, having not enough information to start the generation.

Generation with structural accuracy score

After the data was ready, we used our fine-tuned GPT2-medium model to generate 20 biographies. The generation sampling setup was top_p=0.97, top_k=10. Each of the generated biographies was then checked for validity:

• Whether it was complete - if it has less than 1024 tokens, or if the last token is the pad or end token.
• Whether there were no duplicate sections
• Whether there were no generated control tokens in the textual part of the biography

Then, the structural accuracy scores were calculated for each of the remaining biographies (see the metric details in evaluation section). If the best biography reached over 0.95 structural accuracy, the biography was accepted. Otherwise, the threshold was decreased by 0.05, and the generation procedure was repeated.

Procedural enrichment of the output

The output of the generation was plain text divided into sections. It was important to increase the article plausibility using several post-processing methods:

• First, the text was processed using SpaCy NER model en_core_web_lg. The entities related to locations (GPE) and to the universities (ORG with "university" substring) were manually tested to perform well without further NER training. Each detected entity was replaced with link to the wikipedia page, without checking the actual existence of such a page. The links were intentionally made to look like the internal links to the existing pages on WikiBio. This made the articles more convincing, and in most cases, the links were actually working.
• Finally, the infobox was created using the imported Wikipedia "Template:Infobox person". Besides all the information acquired from the wikidata and used for generation, the biography was also enriched with the picture, whenever it was present in the original wikidata. Thanks to the MediaWiki's InstantCommons feature, it was not required to gather the images: they were forwarded automatically from Wikimedia Commons based on the provided image name.

Wikipedia page upload using Pywikibot

The final biography text, consisting of plain-text with NER-based links and infobox, was then saved as a WikiBio page. pyWikibot library was used to build a MediaWiki bot and the special bot account credentials were generated for this occasion. The pipeline was running for about 17 hours in total, on Google Colab Tesla V100, resulting in 1389 generated biographies.

Evaluation

Evaluation schema

Objective (automatic)

We used three different approaches for automatic evaluation. The translation metrics such as BLEU or GLEU are SOTA for generic text generation tasks, therefore there was a possibility that they could work in this case as well. Then, we implemented a naive check method, named structural accuracy, which was used to assess the biography quality in the final generation task. Finally, we worked on the new metric, codenamed (Top-TIKPIT Neighbours), which was meant to be tailored for the specifics of our task and better explain the differences between the original and generated data in a visual way.

Translation metrics

We wanted to use translation metrics (BLEU and GLEU) in the manner typical for this kind of tasks. That is, we generated multiple biographies, which we put as a reference to test the hypothesis - real biography. This way, the real biography should score higher given the better reference biographies, which implies the better generation in the indirect manner. Unfortunately, the metric didn't provide any conclusive results. The variance of the scores was very high (from 0.01 to 0.32), and the metric have sometimes scored better on the samples, which we perceived as much worse. It became clear that in encyclopedic articles, the linguistic smoothness and use of specific words is not as important as the fact coherence and ideas abstract from the linguistic perspective, such as time spans or event precedence. We decided to continue our efforts with other metrics.

Structural accuracy

The structural accuracy is a naive, but very efficient method we used to evaluate the coherence between the provided data and generated biography. The method was successful enough to be incorporated into the production pipeline. This is how it works, in three steps:

• The tokens are removed from input structure:

"<|start|> Marco Polo <|description|> Painter <|professions|> Painter, Writer <|birth|> 1720 <|death|> 1793 <|summary|>" -> "Marco Polo Painter Painer, Writer 1720 1793"

• The remaining structure is lowercased and split into tokens. Only alphanumeric characters are kept, stopwords are removed using NLTK english stopwords list:

"Marco Polo Painter Painter, Writer 1720 1793" -> ["marco", "polo", "painter", "writer", "1720", "1793"]

• The generated text is evaluated for presence of the listed words. The percentage of the words present in the text become the score.

For example generation output from section "Generation methods": The name and years are correct, however there is no mention of "writer" - the score is 0.83.

The above example shows clearly, how this rough approximation of the biography "validity" can be a useful tool - it correctly scored the biography of painter-writer lower, because the generated text was only about the painter.

Trivia

After setting everything up, we googled randomly for WikiBio, and found that there was a dataset for table-to-text generation (so, very similar task) created just two years ago, with the same name! https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Table-to-text-Generation-by-Structure-aware-Seq2seq-Liu-Wang/3580d8a5e7584e98d547ebfed900749d347f6714 We promise there was no naming inspiration, and it's quite funny to see that coincidence