Computer Generated Trivia?

[audiodude]

(originally posted in Computer Science & Culture)

Here's a problem that definitely has something to do with Natural Language Processing:

I've been searching all over the internet and can't find anything on the topic of computer or automatically generated trivia. At first glance, it seems like you could crawl Wikipedia and generate lots of interesting trivia questions. The hard part would then seem to be picking ones that are interesting to a human. For example "Stephen Merchant is the voice of Wheatley in Valve's 2011 video game Portal 2" could be easily transformed to "Who is the voice of Wheatley in Valve's 2011 video game Portal 2?". But is that actually a good trivia question? Is it pertinent and tantalizing?

Basically I'd like to know if anyone knows of any AI or expert systems that have been used to generate trivia. I'd also like to start a discussion on the relative difficulty of generating trivia from Wikipedia articles and the related problem of curating such trivia sets.

I know that Anaphora Resolution will come up in this...

Thanks!

 

[Mathers2013]

I'm not really interested in trivia. I don't like problems with only one solution.

 

[Buddha12]

There are several trivia sites online already, why not just use them?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...sYGQDw&usg=AFQjCNHvS_xh92g5zlBjGOEoFmlajJ4xpw

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Remember IBM's Watson, who won jeopardy?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/17/ibm-computer-watson-wins-jeopardy

If reprogrammed to create questions, I'm sure it could create millions per day.
The odd one would not make sense though.

The difficulty in creating trivia quizzes is suiting them to the contestants.
If people don't get at least half the questions right, they find them annoying.
The setter needs to tailor the questions so that people either know, or can work out, most of the answers.

 

[Buddha12]

No money in it, perhaps that's why it isn't being done?