Online Gaming for Crowd-sourcing Phrase-equivalents

We propose the use of a game with a purpose (GWAP) to facilitate crowd-sourcing of phraseequivalents, as an alternative to expert or paid crowd-sourcing. Doodling is an online multiplayer game, in which one player (drawer), draws pictures on a shared board to get the other players (guessers) to guess the meaning behind an assigned phrase. In this paper we describe the system and results from several experiments intended to improve the quality of information generated by the play. In addition, we describe the mechanism by which we take candidate phrases generated during the games and filter out true phrase equivalents. We expect that, at scale, this game will be more cost-efficient than paid mechanisms for a similar task, and demonstrate this by comparing the productivity of an hour of game play to an equivalent crowd-sourced Amazon Mechanical Turk task to produce phrase-equivalents over one week.