Two years ago in this space, I mused about the potential of Wikipedia as the foundation of high quality data mining and search tools, including for historical research. (I also ran a test, the results of which were mixed, but promising.) Now comes a workshop entitled “Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy,” at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. From the call for papers:

As a large-scale repository of structured knowledge, Wikipedia has become a valuable resource for a diverse set of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Major conferences in natural language processing and machine learning have recently witnessed a significant number of approaches that use Wikipedia for tasks ranging from text categorization and clustering to word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, information extraction and question answering…

The goal of the workshop is to foster the research and dissemination of ideas on the mutually beneficial interaction between Wikipedia and AI. The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary…We also encourage participation of researchers from other areas who might benefit from the use of a large body of machine-readable knowledge.