WIKIAI09

User-Contributed Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy

An IJCAI 2009 Workshop.

Overview

The performance of an Artificial Intelligence system often depends on the amount of world knowledge available to it. During the last decade, the AI community has witnessed the emergence of a number of highly structured knowledge repositories whose collaborative nature has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of world knowledge that can now be exploited in AI applications. Arguably, the best-known repository of user-contributed knowledge is Wikipedia. Since its inception less than eight years ago, it has become one of the largest and fastest growing online sources of encyclopedic knowledge. One of the reasons why Wikipedia is appealing to contributors and users alike is the richness of its embedded structural information: articles are hyperlinked to each other and connected to categories from an ever expanding taxonomy; pervasive language phenomena such as synonymy and polysemy are addressed through redirection and disambiguation pages; entities of the same type are described in a consistent format using infoboxes; related articles are grouped together in series templates.