Semantics Discovery via Human Computation Games

The effective acquisition of (semantic) metadata is crucial for many present day applications. Games with a purpose address this issue by transforming computational problems into computer games. We present a novel approach to metadata acquisition via Little Search Game (LSG) – a competitive web search game, whose purpose is the creation of a term relationship network. From a player perspective, the goal is to reduce the number of search results returned for a given search term by adding negative search terms to a query. We describe specific aspects of the game's design, including player motivation and anti-cheating issues. We have performed a series of experiments with Little Search Game, acquired real-world player input, gathered qualitative feedback from the players, constructed and evaluated term relationship network from the game logs and examined the types of created relationships.