X-plain: A Game that Collects Common Sense Propositions

Abstract

Common sense knowledge is very important for some NLP tasks, but it is hard to extract from existing linguistic resources. Thus specialized collections of common sense propositions are created. This paper presents one of the ways of making such collection w.r.t. Czech language. We have created a cooperative game, where computer program plays together with human. The purpose of the game is to describe a word with short sentences to the co-player. While the human player is expected to use his/her common sense, the computer program uses word sketches. The paper describes in detail the game, its background and discusses the need for motivation and game policy. It also discusses the quality and coverage of the collection.