Abstract—Acquisition and representation of semantic concepts is a necessary requirement for the understanding of natural languages by cognitive systems. Word games provide an interesting opportunity for semantic knowledge acquisition that may be used to construct semantic memory. A task-dependent architecture of the knowledge base inspired by psycholinguistic theories of human cognition process is introduced. The core of the system is an algorithm for semantic search using a simplified vector representation of concepts. Based on this algorithm a 20 questions game has been implemented. This implementation provides an example of an application of the semantic memory, but also allows for testing the linguistic competence of the system. A web portal with Haptek-based talking head interface facilitates acquisition of a new knowledge while playing the game and engaging in dialogs with users. I.

Abstract. Internet literature queries return a long lists of citations, ordered according to their relevance or date. Query results may also be represented using Visual Language that takes as input a small set of semantically related concepts present in the citations. First experiments with such visualization have been done using PubMed neuronal plasticity citations with manually created semantic graphs. Here neurocognitive inspirations are used to create similar semantic graphs in an automated fashion. This way a long list of citations is changed to small semantic graphs that allow semi-automated query refinement and literature based discovery. 1

years of labeling the subject as unobservable and thus not amenable to rigorous investigation, has initially brought a lot of discussions among the philosophers of mind. Soon other cognitive scientists followed, and now consciousness research is in full swing on many fronts, with its own specialized journals (Consciousness and Cognition, Journal of Consciousness Studies) and series of conferences. In the past few years various attempts to define the problem of consciousness from engineering or computational perspective have emerged. Although detailed brain mechanisms responsible for consciousness are not yet known chances are that it might be possible to build conscious machines using some brain-like architectures. Indeed it has been argued [?] that a system with proper relations between its internals states that control its behavior, able to comment on these states, should behave as