Herd It: Online Game for Improving Music Search

There exist already many music search engines. However, they are all asking the name of a song or a singer.
The problem is that many people are searching for the songs that they have just heard and they don't know exactly the name of the group or the song. So there is a demand for a special music search engine based on new principles.

Interesting approach to a special-purpose music discovery search engine was proposed by the "Herd It" team: search by description.

The search engine is only in Beta version, however there is a possibility to find a music by style, mood (happy, sad, energetic), by color with what you associate this music.

For creating such kind of music tagging that enables this new concept of music search human computation is required.
So in traditions of "games with a purpose" a multi-player online game, positioned on Facebook, was developed to enable the crowdsourcing.
The game is easy and fun to play. I find it the most interesting games of all described. The design is also quite awesome!!!
Am really excited about the future release of this beta-search.

Some important publications about "games with a purpose"

1. L. von Ahn: “Games with a purpose”. Computer, vol. 29(6), pp. 92–94, 2006.
2. L. von Ahn and L. Dabbish: “Labeling images with a computer game”. In proceedings of conference human factors in computing systems (CHI 04), ACM Press, pp. 319–326, 2004.
3. L. von Ahn: “Peekaboom: A game for locating objects in images”. In proceedings of conference human factors in computing systems (CHI06), ACM Press, pp. 55–64, 2006.
4. E. Law et al.: “Tagatune”. In proceedings of International Conference Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 07), Austrian Computer Soc., pp.361–364, 2007.

Sentiment Quiz: Playing On Facebook

A good way to find people for playing your game is to put it on the social network: And what can be better and more effective than Facebook?!
Sentiment Quiz exploits human intelligence for providing words' collocations. A player should choose if the word written is positive, very positive, negative, very negative or neutral. If his choice matches with the answers of other players, he will get points and a small icon depicting him tries to get ahead of his concurents. The game is available in 7 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. One can win DVD from movie collection if he gets the most points.

Design of the game leaves somehow much to be desired. In comparison with the GWAP, it is not so colourful and competetive. There is also no time restriction: you can play as long as you wish.
The results will be used for some scientific research. I think, something in SentiWordNet style or opinion mining. Maybe also lexical functions or machine translations.
Somehow, the Sentiment Quiz team have recently gathered 98% evaluated terms. Within this period 5540 players helped evaluating terms from different languages!!! Sounds amazing!!!

GWAP from Bing: Page Hunt

Page Hunt is investigating the human search behavior. Launched in July 2009, the online game presents users ('page hunters') with a random Web page asking them to input search terms that will place this Website within Bing’s top five search results.


If the search query puts the page on the first place, then the user gets 100 points, on the second place - 90 points. For non-frequent successful queries, the player gets additional scores.

 
I find disadvantageous that there is no explicit competition as the user plays alone. I suppose, if the online game would be multiplayer, it would bring additional motivation for the user.

More information about the game can be found:
on eWeek;
on ReadWriteWeb;
and on Technology review.

A publication to this topic:
H. Ma, R. Chandrasekar, C. Quirk, A. Gupta: “Page Hunt: Improving search engines using human computation games”. Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2009.

Phrase Detectives: Solving the anaphor resolution

Phrase Detectives exploits "human computation" in the anaphor resolution task. This is one of the linguistic problem which is hard to solve. There are many automatic algorithms trying to resolve anaphor resolution. But it is too complicated task for the PC and quite simple but boring for the end user. I did this task to get a note at the university. i wasn't paid for it and it was quite boring.

But hidden under the pretty interface and given the challenging motivations to compete and to try to win 75 pounds for the first place, 50 pounds for the second place and 25 pounds for the third place once a month, it could be worth doing it. Moreover, the idea that you are improving the future of technology gives you comfort. And this all on the fair basis of the highest month score. [It seems to me that it is quite reachable and maybe I should play more games then I will get the same amount of money as for working hard? :)]

So on trying to reach the highest score I help to create the anaphorically annotated AnaWiki (wikipedia of the research lab from the Essex University).

It is interesting to understand how do they validate the results, how good are results, etc. I will try to find more information about it.
During four weeks they have gained over 40.000 annotations!!! That sounds quite well. I wonder, how much they should have paid if the persons making the resolving tasks were their employees.

More information about this online game you can find on these Webpages:
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/information_technology/networked_human_computation_solve_computer_language_126034.html

or here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126082345.htm

GWAP: "games with a purpose"

I find the idea of Luis von Ahn great and really unbeatable!!!!
On the Web you have so many people who like to do all the sharing kind of staff, writing journals, Wikipedia's articles, blogs :-)

Why don't give them a job?! Why don't create the applications that make the boring tasks and tests quite interesting, challenging and entertaining?!

I want to enlighten in my blog the Web applications that I found interesting and "games with a purpose" that I found challenging and useful!