Designing a Chat-bot that Simulates an Historical Figure

There are many applications that are incorporating a human appearance and intending to simulate human dialog, but in most of the cases the knowledge of the conversational bot is stored in a database created by a human experts. However, very few researches have investigated the idea of creating a chat-bot with an artificial character and personality starting from web pages or plain text about a certain person. This paper describes an approach to the idea of identifying the most important facts in texts describing the life (including the personality) of an historical figure for building a conversational agent that could be used in middle-school CSCL scenarios.