Endowing a Cognitive Architecture with World Knowledge

Although computational models developed in cognitive architectures are often rich in their knowledge of procedural skills, they are often poor in their knowledge of declarative facts about the world. This work endows the ACT-R cognitive architecture with world knowledge derived from Wikipedia, compiling a knowledge base of over 37 million declarative facts that can be accessed by a cognitive model via standard memory retrievals. Estimates of the accessibility of these facts are also derived from Wikipedia text, allowing ACT-R to utilize the likelihood of knowing a fact and associations between related facts. Integration with a simple procedural model demonstrates how the knowledge base may serve not only to answer simple factual questions, but also to disambiguate among multiple possible meanings based on context. The resulting knowledge base can be queried quickly (typically well under one second) and is easily generalizable to other cognitive architectures.