1001 Paraphrases: Incenting Responsible Contributions in Collecting Paraphrases from Volunteers

A variety of applications can benefit from broad and detailed repositories of linguistic and world knowledge. An emerging approach to acquiring such repositories is to collect them from volunteer contributors. To increase the volume of contributions, some deployed systems for collecting volunteer-contributed knowledge offer recognition or prizes to those who provide the highest volume of contributions. However, rewarding for volume alone can encourage irresponsible contributions by unscrupulous participants. In this paper, we present an approach to collection from volunteers which incents responsible contributions. Rather than asking contributors to simply enter knowledge, our approach is to collect additional answers by asking contributors to guess partially obfuscated answers. To test the approach, we have implemented an online game, 1001 Paraphrases (http://aigames.org/paraphrase.html), and deployed it to collect 20,944 entries paraphrasing 400 statements. We present preliminary observations and lessons learned on the success of the approach.