A Virtual Player for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” based on Question Answering

This work presents a virtual player for the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”. The virtual player demands linguistic and common sense knowledge and adopts state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Question Answering technologies to answer the questions. Wikipedia articles and DBpedia triples are used as knowledge sources and the answers are ranked according to several lexical, syntactic and semantic criteria. Preliminary experiments carried out on the Italian version of the boardgame proves that the virtual player is able to challenge human players.