Natat in Cerebro: Intelligent Information Retrieval for “The Guillotine” Language Game

This paper describes OTTHO (On the Tip of my THOught), a system designed for solving a language game, called Guillotine. 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. The system performs retrieval from several knowledge sources, such as a dictionary, a set of proverbs, and Wikipedia to realize a knowledge infusion process. The main motivation for designing an artificial player for Guillotine is the challenge of providing the machine with the cultural and linguistic background knowledge which makes it similar to a human being, with the ability of interpreting natural language documents and reasoning on their content. Our feeling is that the approach presented in this work has a great potential for other more practical applications besides solving a language game.