Equipping a Conversational Agent with Access to Wikipedia Knowledge

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become a popular source of knowledge and often constitutes the first choice for humans looking up information on the internet. Thereby, additional characteristics like the categorization of articles and the allocation of disambiguation pages support Wikipedia users in their search for the relevant article. By representing this information in an adequate format, machines are already able to process and use these additional hints as well. In the KnowCIT project we focus on extending the conversational abilities of the embodied conversational agent Max (Kopp et al. 2005) by accessing Wikipedia as an external source of information. This allows Max to look up information on Wikipedia similar to humans and to employ encyclopedic knowledge on request. More precisely, if the human dialog partner asks for information about a term which is not contained in the agent's present knowledge base so far, the system searches for an adequate Wikipeda article. A successful article search leads