Making Any Wikipedia Topic Dystopian

I once read a Tweet that said, “you can make any Wikipedia article dystopian by changing it to the past tense.” Dystopian Wikipedia sounded fun fitting for our quasi-dystopian times, so I built Dystopedia as a proof-of-concept. Try the demo on Hugging Face Spaces, and keep reading to learn how I made it.

Building Dystopedia

Since the Tweet uses the Wikipedia page for water as an example, I got started by fetching the first seven sentences of that article using the wikipedia library. Text from the Wikipedia article is copyrighted Wikipedia and shared here under CC BY-SA 3.0.

import wikipedia


result = wikipedia.search("water", results=1)
summary = wikipedia.summary(
  result[0],
  sentences=7,
  auto_suggest=False,
  redirect=True
)

print(summary)

Next, I parsed and tagged the summary using spaCy and converted present tense verbs to the past tense using LemmInflect. According to Wikipedia’s style guide, articles are written in the present tense by default.

import lemminflect
import spacy


nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_lg")

def make_past_tense(token):
  if token.tag_ in ("VBP", "VBZ"):
    return f'{token._.inflect("VBD")} '
  return token.text_with_ws

doc = nlp(summary)
dystopian_summary = "".join(
  [make_past_tense(token) for token in doc]
)

print(dystopian_summary)

So far, so good! But what if I only changed the articles for topics with positive connotations instead of making all articles past tense? What if nothing “good” existed anymore, but anything “bad” or “neutral” were left unaltered?

Using a transformers pipeline, I created a function to determine whether a given text was positive. Its underlying model is DistilBERT base uncased finetuned SST-2, the default sentiment analysis model transformers used when I built Dystopedia.

from transformers import pipeline


sentiment_analyzer = pipeline(
  "sentiment-analysis",
  model="distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english",
  revision="af0f99b"
)

def is_positive(text):
  return sentiment_analyzer(text)[0]["label"] == "POSITIVE"

for word in ("good", "bad"):
  if is_positive(word):
    print(f'"{word}" was labelled positive')
  else:
    print(f'"{word}" was not labelled positive')

To my surprise, the sentiment analyzer didn’t classify the summary for water as positive.

print(is_positive(summary))

Hmm, why was this the case? What if we analyzed the summary sentence by sentence?

Well, the first sentence was “positive.”

sentences = list(doc.sents)

print(sentences[0])
print(is_positive(sentences[0].text))

But the second wasn’t.

print(sentences[1])
print(is_positive(sentences[1].text))

What about the term “water” on its own?

“Positive.”

print(is_positive("water"))

From this, and for my purposes, it seemed more reliable to determine whether a topic was positive using a term rather than a summary.

def make_dystopian(term, text):
  doc = nlp(text)
  if is_positive(term):
    return "".join([make_past_tense(token) for token in doc])
  return doc.text


for word in ("good", "bad"):
  print(make_dystopian(word, f"{word.capitalize()} things exist."))

Now that I’d worked out a general approach, I could build a quick demo using Gradio as a web interface.

I created a function that searches for a term on Wikipedia and yields the first sentence of the article retrieved. It then makes the sentence dystopian or provides a helpful error message if something goes wrong.

import gradio as gr


def get_dystopian_summary(term):
  if term == "":
    return term

  try:
    results = wikipedia.search(term, results=1)
  except wikipedia.exceptions.DisambiguationError as e:
    raise gr.Error(e.error)

  if len(results) == 0:
    raise gr.Error(
      f'Could not find an article on the term "{term}". '
      'Try searching for a different topic.'
    )

  summary = wikipedia.summary(
    results[0],
    sentences=1,
    auto_suggest=False,
    redirect=True
  )
  return make_dystopian(term, summary)

print(get_dystopian_summary("water"))

Finally, I wrapped the function in a Gradio interface to create a demo.

def launch_demo(**kwargs):
  title = "Dystopedia"
  description = (
    "Make any Wikipedia topic dystopian. Inspired by "
    "[this Tweet](https://twitter.com/lbcyber/status/1115015586243862528). "
    "Dystopedia uses [DistilBERT base uncased finetuned SST-2](https://huggingface.co/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english) "
    "for sentiment analysis and is subject to its limitations and biases."
  )
  examples = ["joy", "hope", "peace", "Earth", "water", "food"]
  gr.Interface(
    fn=get_summary,
    inputs=gr.Textbox(label="term", placeholder="Enter a term...", max_lines=1),
    outputs=gr.Textbox(label="description"),
    title=title,
    description=description,
    examples=examples,
    cache_examples=True,
    allow_flagging="never",
  ).launch(**kwargs)

# If running remotely on Binder, set `share=True` in `launch_demo()`
launch_demo(show_error=True)

What’s Next?

Dystopedia uses an incredibly unsophisticated algorithm to transform a text from present to past tense: For each token in a text, if a token is a present tense verb, convert it to past tense. Otherwise, leave the token unchanged. Unfortunately, since this approach doesn’t consider auxiliary verbs, it wouldn’t work for articles about upcoming events or sentences with complex verb phrases.

Dystopedia was an afternoon project; I don’t plan to keep building it. However, I plan on learning more about controllable text generation and sophisticated techniques for morphological inflection.

Resources

• Try Dystopedia on Hugging Face Spaces
• Dystopedia’s source code
• Companion notebook for this blog post
• spaCy 101: Everything you need to know
• Transformers Pipelines API reference
• Gradio Quickstart