Fun Facts: Automatic Trivia Fact Extraction from Wikipedia

Fun Facts: Automatic Trivia Fact Extraction from Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2017, written by David Tsurel, Dan Pelleg, Ido Guy and Dafna Shahaf.

Overview

A significant portion of web search queries directly refers to named entities. Search engines explore various ways to improve the user experience for such queries. Authors suggest augmenting search results with trivia facts about the searched entity. Trivia is widely played throughout the world, and was shown to increase users' engagement and retention. Most random facts are not suitable for the trivia section. There is skill (and art) to curating good trivia. In this paper, authors formalize a notion of trivia-worthiness and propose an algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts from Wikipedia. Authors take advantage of Wikipedia's category structure, and rank an entity's categories by their trivia-quality. Authors algorithm is capable of finding interesting facts, such as Obama's Grammy or Elvis' stint as a tank gunner. In user studies, algorithm captures the intuitive notion of "good trivia" 45% higher than prior work. Search-page tests show a 22% decrease in bounce rates and a 12% increase in dwell time, proving facts hold users' attention.