I nfo S ync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables (2023)

Abstract: Information Synchronization of semi-structured data across languages is challenging. For example, Wikipedia tables in one language need to be synchronized with others. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset InfoSync and a two-step method for tabular synchronization. InfoSync contains 100K entity-centric tables (Wikipedia Infoboxes) across 14 languages, of which a subset (~3.5K pairs) are manually annotated. The proposed method includes 1) Information Alignment to map rows and 2) Information Update for updating missing/outdated information for aligned tables across multilingual tables. When evaluated on InfoSync, information alignment achieves an F1 score of 87.91 (en <-> non-en). To evaluate information updation, we perform human-assisted Wikipedia edits on Infoboxes for 532 table pairs. Our approach obtains an acceptance rate of 77.28% on Wikipedia, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

## introduction english articles across the web are more timely updated than other languages on particular subjects. meanwhile, culture differences, topic preferences, and editing inconsistency lead to information mismatch across multilingual data, e.g., outdated information or missing information @xcite . online encyclopedia, e.g., wikipedia, contains millions of articles that need to be updated constantly, involving expanding existing articles, modifying content such as correcting facts in sentences @xcite and altering wikipedia categories @xcite . however, more than 40% of wikipedia's active editors are in english. at the same time, only 15% of the world population speak english as their first language. therefore, information in languages other table lacks the "british rule of india" as a cultural context. two value mismatches (a) the hindi table doesn't list died key's state (b) institution values differ. the hindi table mentions "residence" while the english table doesn't. hindi table is missing thesis, awards, and alma mater keys. both don't mention parents, early education, or honors. to overcome the above-mentioned problem, we formally introduce the task of information synchronization for multilingual articles, which includes paragraphs, tables, lists, categories, and images. but due to its magnitude and complexity, synchronizing all of the information across different modalities on a webpage is daunting. therefore, this work focuses on semi-structured data, a.k.a. table synchronization in a few languages, as the first step toward our mission. we consider infobox, a particular type of semistructured wikipedia tables @xcite , which contain entity-centric information, where we observe various information mismatches, e.g., missing rows (cf. figure 1 ). one intuitive idea to address them is translation-based. however, the infoboxes contain rows with implicit context; translating these short phrases is prone to errors and leads to ineffective synchronization @xcite . to systematically assess the challenge, we curate a dataset, namely infosync, consisting of 100k multilingual infobox tables across 14 languages and covering 21 wikipedia categories. ∼3.5k table pairs of english to non-english or non-english to non-english are sampled and manually synchronized. we propose a table synchronization approach that comprises two steps: (1.) information alignment: align table rows, and (2.) information update: update missing or outdated rows across language pairs to circumvent the inconsistency. the information alignment component aims to align the rows in multilingual tables. the proposed method uses corpus statistics across wikipedia, such as key and value-based similarities. the information update step relies on an effective rule-based approach. we manually curate nine rules: row transfer, time-based, value trends, multi-key matching, append value, high to low resource, number of row differences, and rare keys. both tasks are evaluated on infosync to demonstrate their effectiveness. apart from the automatic evaluation, we deploy an online experiment that submits the detected mismatches by our method to wikipedia after strictly following wikipedia editing guidelines. we monitor the number of accepted and rejected edits by wikipedia editors to demonstrate its efficacy. all proposed edits are performed manually, in accordance with wikipedia's editing policies and guidelines 1 , rule set 2 , and policies 3 . these changes were subsequently accepted by wikipedia editors, demonstrating the efficacy of our methodology. the contributions in this work are as follows: 1) we investigate the problem of information synchronization across multilingual semi-structured data, i.e., tables, and construct a large-scale dataset infosync; 2) we propose a two-step approach (alignment and updation) and demonstrate superiority over exiting baselines; 3) the rule-based updation system achieves excellent acceptance when utilized for human-assisted wikipedia editing. our infosync dataset and method source code are available at https://info-sync.github.io/ info-sync/ . 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia: list_of_policies_and_guidelines 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia: simplified_ruleset 3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia: editing_policy ## the infosync dataset to systematically assess the challenge of information synchronization and evaluate the methodologies, we aim to build a large-scale table synchronization dataset infosync based on entity-centric wikipedia infoboxes. ## table synchronization method this section will explain our proposed table synchronization method for addressing missing or outdated information. this method includes two steps: information alignment and update. the former approach aims to align rows across a pair of tables, and the latter helps to update missing or outdated information. we further deploy our update process in a human-assisted wikipedia edit framework to test the efficacy in the real world. ## experiments our experiments assess the efficacy of our proposed two-stage approach by investigating the following questions. ## conclusion and future work information synchronization is a common issue for semi-structured data across languages. taking wikipedia infoboxes as our case study, we created infosync and proposed a two-step procedure that consists of alignment and updation. the alignment method outperforms baseline approaches with an f1-score greater than 85; the rule-based method received a 77.28 percent approval rate when suggesting updates to wikipedia. we identify the following future directions. (a) beyond infobox synchronization. while our technique is relatively broad, it is optimized for wikipedia infoboxes. we want to test whether the strategy applies to technical, scientific, legal, and medical domain tables @xcite . it will also be intriguing to widen the updating rules to include social, economic, and cultural aspects. (b) beyond pairwise alignment. currently, independent language pairs are considered for (bi) alignment. however, multiple languages can be utilized jointly for (multi) alignment. (c) beyond pairwise updates. similar to (multi) alignment, one can jointly update all language variants simultaneously. this can be done in two ways: (1.) with english as pivot language : to update across all languages. here, english act as a central server with message passing. (2.) round-robin fashion: where pairwise language updates between language pairs are transferred in a round-robin ring across all language pairs. in every update, we selected a leader similar to a leader election in distributed systems. (d) joint alignment and updation. even while our current approach is accurate, it employs a two-step process for synchronization, namely alignment followed by updating. we want to create rapid approaches aligning and updating in a single step. (e) text for updation: our method doesn't consider wikipedia articles for updating tables @xcite @xcite .