VenBioGen

Introduction

In this project, we use generative models to come up with creative biographies of Venetian people that existed before the 20th century. Our motivation was originally to observe how such a model would pick up on underlying relationships between Venetian actors in old centuries as well as their relationships with people in the rest of the world. These underlying relationships might or might not come to light in every generated biography, but we can be sure that the model has the potential to offer fresh perspectives on historical tendencies.

Motivation

This project is an interesting exploration into the intersection between Humanities and Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to text generation.

By generating fictional biographies of Venetians up to and including the 19th century, this model allows, on one hand, us to evaluate the current state, progress and limitation of text generation. Even more worthwhile, the question of whether underlying historical tendencies - most commonly under the form of international or inter-familial relationships - are learnt by the model can be explored.

Project Plan and Milestones

Milestone 1 (up to 1 October)

• Brainstorm project ideas
• Prepare presentation to present two ideas for the project

Milestone 2 (up to 14 November)

• Finalize project planning
• Build generative model, using Python with Tensorflow 1.x (to guarantee compatibility with pre-built GPT-2 and BERT models)
  • Finetune GPT-II model
  • Finetune Bert
• Connect both models to create generative pipeline
• Examine generated biographies, and acceptance threshold, and think about further improvements

Milestone 3 (up to 20 November)

• Create frontend for interface (leveraging Bootstrap and jQuery)
• Create backend for interface (using flask), and connect it to the generative module
• Finalize the RESTful API for communication between both ends

Milestone 4 (up to 5 December)

• Add post-processing date adjustment module
• Add historical realism enhancement module
• Assess feasibility and costs involved with outsourcing evaluation to a platform such as AMZ Mechanical Turk

Milestone 5 (up to 11 December)

• Have reached a decision with regards to evaluation procedure
• Conduct model evaluation
• Review code
• Finalize documentation
• Finalize report

Generative module

Data processing pipeline

Data collection

As a first step in the processing pipeline, we queried a Wikipedia API.