Coreference Annotation of an A rabic Corpus using a Virtual World Game (2022)

Abstract: Coreference resolution is a key aspect of text comprehension, but the size of the available coreference corpora for Arabic is limited in comparison to the size of the corpora for other languages. In this paper we present a Game-With-A-Purpose called Stroll with a Scroll created to collect from players coreference annotations for Arabic. The key contribution of this work is the embedding of the annotation task in a virtual world setting, as opposed to the puzzle-type games used in previously proposed Games-With-A-Purpose for coreference.

## introduction coreference resolution is the task of clustering the mentions in a text that refer to the same real world entity. in the following example of coreference resolution, bold phrases are said to corefer as they point to the same discourse entity, a person named ibn sina. ibn sina is a scientist and doctor who was known for philosophy and medicine. one of the most famous writings of the scientist is the canon of medicine. coreference resolution is a key element of text comprehension @xcite . identifying references to entities in the context is essential for meaning interpretation. in addition, anaphoric references are an important aspect of textual cohesion, as they connect different parts of the text to ensure its unity. resolving anaphoric references is essential for most natural language processing (nlp) applications, including automatic translation, information extraction and topic detection @xcite . collecting coreference annotations from experts can be expensive, so crowdsourcing is often employed @xcite . this can be done using a crowdsourcing platform @xcite or by embedding the annotation task in a game in a seamless manner. such games are referred to as games-with-a-purpose (gwap) @xcite @xcite @xcite . gwaps are games designed to collect judgments from players using their gaming skills and language competence; the main reward for players is entertainment. gwaps have been used e.g., for biological data collection @xcite , and, in ai, for image processing @xcite and natural language processing @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . using gwaps for manual annotation is particularly well-suited when the aim is to collect large corpora, that would be too expensive to create using other forms of crowdsourcing @xcite . the objective of this research is to create a gwap called stroll with a scroll for arabic coreference annotation. the motivations for our work are: our main contributions are: ## stroll with a scroll in this paper we introduce stroll with a scroll, a gwap for (arabic) coreference annotation in which the player is an agent embedded in a 3d world. ## discussion we introduced stroll with a scroll , a new gwap for annotating coreference in arabic. our gwap is based on the motivation-annotation paradigm from wormingo in having two disjoint parts: the puzzles part and the annotation part. this division ensures that the orthogonal game design mechanics e.g., aiming, driving and dropping that are the main contributors to most of the popular video games are separated from the annotation task. video games are separated from the annotation task, so as not to negatively impact the annotation accuracy @xcite . however, the motivation and the annotation are both embedded in a virtual world scenario: document search involves finding chests in an old town, and filling gaps in the document is naturally presented as reconstructing the scroll. we expect that this novel setting will make the game more attractive to certain types of players who are more interested in 3d games than in puzzles. ## limitations the future based rewards of the annotation part might discourage the players to continue. furthermore, in the current development stage, the player does not have the option to select antecedents outside of the suggested ones. ## conclusion games-with-a-purpose for collecting text annotations are an increasingly popular alternative to crowdsourcing platforms. even so, to our knowledge there is no gwap of collecting arabic coreference annotation. we present a 3d virtual world gwap of collecting coreference annotations for arabic corpus. we expect the adoption of a virtual world setting would increase the chances of attracting players.