5 ms·

Abstract Wikipedia

28 points by abbe98 6mo ago

internet_points 6mo ago
> Let's follow one example: Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. In Abstract Wikipedia, this might be stored as: Z27243(Q1033, Q138758272, Q6256, Q15, Z27243K5) Haha that's like John Wilkins' "Real Character, and a Philosophical Language" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfetta_nella_Cultura_Europea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfet... is a great intro to the weird and wonderful world of abstract/universal/ideal/a priori languages.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  It's not that different from how LLM tokens work, only in a tree structure as opposed to a plain sequence. Having a tree structure makes it easier to formally define rewrite rules (which is key for interpretability), as opposed to learning them from data as LLM do.
  - internet_points 6mo ago
    Also tokens don't represent meaning in themselves, but are assigned points in a multidimensional space, they can only represent meaning in the network as a whole when combined with other tokens in context and order. And the abstract concepts of Abstract Wikipedia are human-defined, top-down ways of carving the world into distinct categories which make some kind of logical sense, whereas LLM's work bottom-up and create overlapping, non-hierarchical, probabilistic networks of connections with nearly no imposed structure except the principle that you shall know a token by the company it keeps. But you can type them both out with keys on a keyboard so in that sense I guess they're not that different.
casey2 6mo ago
So rather than machine translation... really primitive machine translation with extra steps?
- Hasslequest 6mo ago
  Would you rather use a compiler, or have an LLM generate assembly code based on source code? The purpose is to establish a new high-level lanugage
rustyhancock 6mo ago
One issue with projects like this just show me what it is on the front page. Even the featured article section is empty!
- brettermeier 6mo ago
  Correct, what is this and why is this?
zinekeller 6mo ago
For context, this was proposed way back in 2013 (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia), when machine translation is just plain bad (and LLMs are only known in academic circles). Surprised that AWiki is now active though.
orbital-decay 6mo ago
Are they trying to reinvent Cyc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
deleted 6mo ago
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28 points by abbe98 6mo ago

> Let's follow one example: Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. In Abstract Wikipedia, this might be stored as: Z27243(Q1033, Q138758272, Q6256, Q15, Z27243K5) Haha that's like John Wilkins' "Real Character, and a Philosophical Language" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfetta_nella_Cultura_Europea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfet... is a great intro to the weird and wonderful world of abstract/universal/ideal/a priori languages.

zozbot234 6mo ago
It's not that different from how LLM tokens work, only in a tree structure as opposed to a plain sequence. Having a tree structure makes it easier to formally define rewrite rules (which is key for interpretability), as opposed to learning them from data as LLM do.
- internet_points 6mo ago
  Also tokens don't represent meaning in themselves, but are assigned points in a multidimensional space, they can only represent meaning in the network as a whole when combined with other tokens in context and order. And the abstract concepts of Abstract Wikipedia are human-defined, top-down ways of carving the world into distinct categories which make some kind of logical sense, whereas LLM's work bottom-up and create overlapping, non-hierarchical, probabilistic networks of connections with nearly no imposed structure except the principle that you shall know a token by the company it keeps. But you can type them both out with keys on a keyboard so in that sense I guess they're not that different.

casey2 6mo ago

So rather than machine translation... really primitive machine translation with extra steps?

Hasslequest 6mo ago
Would you rather use a compiler, or have an LLM generate assembly code based on source code? The purpose is to establish a new high-level lanugage

rustyhancock 6mo ago

One issue with projects like this just show me what it is on the front page. Even the featured article section is empty!

brettermeier 6mo ago
Correct, what is this and why is this?

zinekeller 6mo ago

For context, this was proposed way back in 2013 (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia), when machine translation is just plain bad (and LLMs are only known in academic circles). Surprised that AWiki is now active though.

orbital-decay 6mo ago

Are they trying to reinvent Cyc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]