Abstract Wikipedia
25 points by abbe98 a day ago | 9 comments
  • internet_points a day 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_Perfet... is a great intro to the weird and wonderful world of abstract/universal/ideal/a priori languages.

    • zozbot234 a day 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 5 hours 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 a day ago |
    So rather than machine translation... really primitive machine translation with extra steps?
    • Hasslequest a day 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 a day 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 a day ago |
      Correct, what is this and why is this?
  • zinekeller a day ago |
    For context, this was proposed way back in 2013 (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 a day ago |
    Are they trying to reinvent Cyc?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc