Looking Ahead - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 133

Chapter 9
Looking Ahead
Abstract The crowdsourcing and semantics acquisition games were with us for
almost a decade. They helped solving many human intelligence tasks and attracted
many researchers and practitioners. They demonstrated their potential, but also
revealed weak points, among other, the inefficient incentives. As a meta-problem, the
lack of holistic design methodology is still actual. Yet, we see the brighter future for
the SAG field (as well as for the crowdsourcing in general), because of the constant
progress of the humankind towards reducing the needs for manual work and leaving
capacities for “mind labor”.
We have shown that semantics acquisition happens to be the most crucial part of
workingwith semantics. Althoughmuch effort has been done in automated semantics
acquisition, there is still a need for human labor to complement it. The question
on how to engage the people to participate in this process is still open. A large
family of approaches—based on crowdsourcing—has been able to address the issues
of costs and quantity demands, but for a price of uncertain quality of delivered
results. The crowdsourcing approaches thrive to motivate their workers by alternative
motivational factors, optimize the labor deployment and attempts to acquire more
specific metadata.
In particular, we reviewed much of the current state of the art of crowdsourcing
games and semantics acquisition games (SAGs) in particular. For almost a decade the
crowdsourcing games were an agenda for a constantly growing number of researchers
(Pe-Than et al. reported over hundred of works [ 2 ]). We have seen crowdsourcing
game performing jobs for various domains, often connected to semantics acquisition
(their deployment outside semantics acquisition domain is sparse, but perspectively
not restricted). In many cases the SAGs proved that they are able to motivate their
players to contribute their brain-power. On the other hand, the field of SAG design
is still only loosely conceptualized and we lack a holistic SAG design methodology.
SAG design has also been evolving. SAGs initially emerged with one domi-
nant design principle: a two player game where players “control” each other. Later
other paradigms pursuing single player schemes appeared, though the multiplayer
variant prevails dominant to this day. SAGs comprise several forms of aesthetics: