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arXiv · 2402.14207

Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models

Yijia Shao·Yucheng Jiang·Theodore A. Kanell·Peter Xu·Omar Khattab·Monica S. Lam
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Abstract

We study how to apply large language models to write grounded and organized long-form articles from scratch, with comparable breadth and depth to Wikipedia pages. This underexplored problem poses new challenges at the pre-writing stage, including how to research the topic and prepare an outline prior to writing. We propose STORM, a writing system for the Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking. STORM models the pre-writing stage by (1) discovering diverse perspectives in researching the given topic, (2) simulating conversations where writers carrying different perspectives pose questions to a topic expert grounded on trusted Internet sources, (3) curating the collected information to create an outline. For evaluation, we curate FreshWiki, a dataset of recent high-quality Wikipedia articles, and formulate outline assessments to evaluate the pre-writing stage. We further gather feedback from experienced Wikipedia editors. Compared to articles generated by an outline-driven retrieval-augmented baseline, more of STORM's articles are deemed to be organized (by a 25% absolute increase) and broad in coverage (by 10%). The expert feedback also helps identify new challenges for generating grounded long articles, such as source bias transfer and over-association of unrelated facts.

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Yijia Shao, Yucheng Jiang, Theodore A. Kanell, Peter Xu, Omar Khattab, Monica S. Lam. 2024-04-08. Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14207

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