Events Calendar

NL Seminar-Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose

Speaker: David Jurgens, Stanford University

Talk Title: Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Building systems that understand human language often requires access to large amounts of text annotated with all the features and nuances of human communication. However, building these annotated corpora is often prohibitive due to the time, cost, and expertise required to annotate. While crowdsourcing the work can help, untrained workers still incur costs and the workers may not be as motivated to answer correctly. In this talk, I will describe how to solve this annotation bottleneck using video games in which traditional annotation tasks are transformed into core video game mechanics and embedded in the kinds of games you might play on your mobile phone. Our video games are not only fun to play but are capable of annotating a wide variety of linguistic phenomena at costs lower that crowdsourcing and have quality equal to that of experts. Using four games, I will demonstrate how their creation process can be distilled into reusable design patterns to create new games for different types of tasks in linguistics and beyond.



Biography: David Jurgens is postdoctoral scholar in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2014 and has been a visiting researcher at HRL Laboratories, research scientist at Sapienza University of Rome and postdoctoral scholar at McGill University. His research focuses on two areas: natural language processing, where he works on new methods for understanding the meaning of text, and computational social science where he investigates population dynamics through peoples' language and demographics. He is currently a co-chair of the International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) and of the workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. His research has been featured in Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Business Insider, and Schneier on Security.

Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/