One of my research interests is getting Internet volunteers to contribute to linguistic resources. And here’s one such effort, courtesy of Massimo Poesio: it’s Phrase Detectives.
It’s sort of a fun game where you get points for figuring out how pronouns (and other things) refer back to other entities in a text. Of course, the benefit to linguists is that it all goes toward the creation of a 1.2-million-word anaphor resolution corpus. A very worthwhile project.
29 January 2010 at 8:39 pm
Thank you for the support! We have witnessed a substantial increase in the number of 'players' this January (numbers almost doubled, from around 1,000 to almost 2,000) and in the number of documents for which we have complete annotations (= at least 8 judgments for each noun phrase, each interpretation checked by at least 5 players), which went from less than 100 to more than 200 – and we believe that the contribution of this and other blogs who have talked about us has been crucial! Thanks a lot, and hope you can benefit from the data!