Chatbots are a well-established technology, however the conversational ability of the typical chatbot is greatly restricted. This paper investigates how the performance of a chatbot could be improved by connecting it with a knowledge source that could be used during its interactions with users. A new chatbot, Wallace, was created by extending Alice to incorporate knowledge from Wikipedia into its conversations. Mechanisms were designed and developed to retrieve Wikipedia pages, parse them, and select suitable sentences for the conversation. A user evaluation was conducted on the prototype, which showed that Wallace was generally more effective than Alice at providing factual answers to questions denoting an informational need. Participants also expressed that Wallace was more specific and more entertaining than Alice.
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