Concept Description Vectors and the 20 Question Game

Abstract

Knowledge of properties that are applicable to a given object is a necessary prerequisite to formulate intelligent question. Concept description vectors provide simplest representation of this knowledge, storing for each object information about the values of its properties. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources, are described. Information collected in this way is used to formulate questions that have high discriminating power in the twenty questions game.