Daboo: An interactive system to make a user guess a word as fast as possible (without using taboo words)

This paper presents an architecture and a real time computer system for the automatic generation of text in the specific context of the word guessing game TabooTM. To achieve the game’s goal – let the user guess a word as fast as possible without using certain taboo words – our system Daboo uses sophisticated algorithms to model user knowledge and to interpret semantically the user input. The former is very important to gradually enhance the performance of the system by adapting to the user's strongest "context" of knowledge. The latter helps bridge the gap between a guess and the actual word to guess by creating a semantic relationship between the two. For this purpose we rely on the semantic inheritance tree of WordNet. Daboo acts effectively as the clue giving party of a TabooTM session by interactively generating textual descriptions in real time.