Santhosh Thottingal

Santhosh Thottingal

Parametric fonts are programatically defined fonts with variable parameters, pioneered by Donald Kunth with his MetaFont technology in the 1980s. While Donald Knuth's ideas in MetaFont and subsequently in MetaPost are often seen as legacy techniques from the pre-graphical user interface (GUI) era of type design, recent trends like variable fonts suggest a resurgence of certain principles. This paper explores a modern type design process built on parametric design principles, specifically using MetaPost. The author created two variable fonts with this method and released them under a free, open-source license. The paper details the methodology, workflow, and insights gained from this process.

Santhosh Thottingal

This paper introduces an approach to question answering over knowledge bases like Wikipedia and Wikidata by performing "question-to-question" matching and retrieval from a dense vector embedding store. Instead of embedding document content, we generate a comprehensive set of questions for each logical content unit using an instruction-tuned LLM. These questions are vector-embedded and stored, mapping to the corresponding content. Vector embedding of user queries are then matched against this question vector store. The highest similarity score leads to direct retrieval of the associated article content, eliminating the need for answer generation. Our method achieves high cosine similarity ( > 0.9 ) for relevant question pairs, enabling highly precise retrieval. This approach offers several advantages including computational efficiency, rapid response times, and increased scalability. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including multimedia content through structured fact retrieval from Wikidata, opening up new pathways for multimodal question answering.

Niklas Laxström, Pau Giner, Santhosh Thottingal

The quality and quantity of articles in each Wikipedia language varies greatly. Translating from another Wikipedia is a natural way to add more content, but the translation process is not properly supported in the software used by Wikipedia. Past computer-assisted translation tools built for Wikipedia are not commonly used. We created a tool that adapts to the specific needs of an open community and to the kind of content in Wikipedia. Qualitative and quantitative data indicates that the new tool helps users translate articles easier and faster.