OTTHO: An Artificial Player for a Complex Language Game

This paper describes OTTHO (On the Tip of my THOught), an artificial player able to solve a very popular language game, called “The Guillotine”, broadcast by the Italian National TV company. The game demands knowledge covering a broad range of topics, such as politics, literature, history, proverbs, and popular culture. The rule of the game is simple: the player observes five words, generally unrelated to each other, and in one minute she has to provide a sixth word, semantically connected to the others. In order to find the solution, a human being has to perform a complex memory retrieval task within the facts retained in her own knowledge, concerning the meanings of thousands of words and their contextual relations. In order to make this task executable by machines, machine reading techniques are exploited for knowledge extraction from the web, while Artificial Intelligence techniques are used to infer new knowledge, in the form of keywords, from the extracted