Wikipedia and AI
Lately I’ve been looking at the possibility of using Wikipedia’s interlinking to study collective memory – seeing what associations are made and so on. Here’s an article about using similar techniques to make computers smarter. For example, with anti-spam technology:
This shallow understanding is what makes an e-mail spam filter block all messages containing the word “vitamin,” but fail to block messages containing the word “B12.” “If the program never saw “B12” before, it’s just a word without any meaning. But you would know it’s a vitamin,” Markovitch said.
“With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that “B12” is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins
But the makers are also interested improving intelligence work – if this is done, it will be worth asking if linking practices on wikipedia generate ‘an impoverished database’ in the sense that Mark Poster used the term…
