The problem of semantic equivalence, or paraphrase, is a fundamental one for applications that “understand” natural language. Learned approaches to this problem face a lack of colloquial training data with which to build models. This paper describes, Echo Chamber, a game aimed at collecting sentential paraphrases from web users. Much of our current focus is designing a framework that makes this...

The time has come to click the “join” button once more. It is end of semester, and our colleague Abe, chair ad-hoc task force for online teaching, convened an teaching excellence panel. purveyors said are four faculty members whose evaluations showed that they were, as his email said, “online rockstars.” Unfathomably, I am one four, last scheduled present. One by one, little rectangles pop agai...