A Game-based Approach to Transcribing Images of Text

We present a methodology that takes as input scanned documents of typed or hand-written text, and produces transcriptions of the text as output. Instead of using OCR technology, the methodology is game-based and produces such transcriptions as a by-product. The approach is intended particularly for languages for which language technology and resources are scarce and reliable OCR technology may not exist. It can be used in place of OCR for transcribing individual documents, or to create corpora of paired images and transcriptions required to train OCR tools. We present Minefield, a prototype implementation of the approach which is currently collecting Arabic transcriptions.