Creating Zombilingo, a Game With A Purpose for dependency syntax annotation

International audienceThis paper presents the design of Zombilingo, a Game With A Purpose (GWAP) that allows for the dependency syntax annotation of French corpora. The development will start mid-2014 and the game is to be made available by the end of the year. The created language resource will be freely and continuously available on the game Web site

Crowdsourcing Complex Language Resources: Playing to Annotate Dependency Syntax

International audienceThis article presents the results we obtained on a complex annotation task (that of dependency syntax) using a specifically designed Game with a Purpose, ZombiLingo. We show that with suitable mechanisms (decomposition of the task, training of the players and regular control of the annotation quality during the game), it is possible to obtain annotations whose quality is significantly higher than that obtainable with a parser, provided that enough players participate. The source code of the game and the resulting annotated corpora (for French) are freely available

Annihilated Spaces: American Literature and American Society

Annihilated Space uses American literature to understand our social history. Flexible and inclusive, it shows multiple ways in which national fiction, drama, journals and poetry reveal us. The study builds upon a lifetime of scholarship and experience in areas as diverse as contemporary conditions among Native American peoples, the social structure of the audience for “classical” music, the history of American art, street life in Mexico City and, of course, American literature and the American experience. It suggests approaches that “work” even on pieces set outside the United States, in one case revealing American social history in a novel with no American characters. Some works treated in this lively discussion are acknowledged masterpieces. A few are things critics generally dislike—but they can be entertaining to discuss, and very useful to an open-minded student of society