Ten ways to make your semantic app addictive

Elena SimperlISWC 2010

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Executive summary• Many aspects of semantic content authoring naturally rely

on human contribution.

• Motivating users to contribute is essential for semantic technologies to reach critical mass and ensure sustainable growth.

• This tutorial is about– Methods and techniques to study incentives and motivators

applicable to semantic content authoring scenarios.– How to implement the results of such studies through

technology design, usability engineering, and game mechanics.

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Our approach

• Typology of semantic content authoring tasks andthe ways they could motivate users to contribute.

• Methodology for analyzing and designingincentivized semantic applications.

• Pilots, showcases and technology.

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Incentives and motivation• Incentives are ‘rewards’ assigned by an external ‘judge’

to a performer for undertaking a specific task.

• Common belief (among economists): incentives can be translated into a sum of money for all practical purposes.

• Incentives can be related to both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.– Extrinsic motivation if task is considered

• Boring, dangerous, useless, socially undesirable, dislikable by the performer.

– Intrinsic motivation if• The performer likes what he/she is doing• The act is satisfying in itself (for various reasons).

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Examples (i)

Examples (ii)

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Examples (iii)

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Harnessing human intelligence

Facebook reports 4,000,000,000 minutes (> 7500 person years) are spent on the site every day

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Recaptcha users solve 60 million CAPTCHAs a day, which accounts for around 160,000 human hours (19 person years)

More than 18 000 titlespreserved in 10 years

Harnessing human intelligence

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Which tasks can be crowdsourced?

• Modularity/Divisibility: can the task be divided into smaller chunks (see casual games, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, open source software)

• Skills and expertise: does the task address a broad audience (seeCAPTCHAs, casualgames)

• Combinability– Additive: pulling a rope

(group performs better than individuals, but each individual pulls less hard)

– Conjunctive: running in a pack (performance is that of the weakest member, group size reduces group performance)

– Disjunctive: answering a quiz (group size increases group performance in term of the time needed to answer)

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Example: video annotation

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Example: ontology alignment

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Example: ontology evaluation

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Typology of semantic contentauthoring tasks: Table from D1.2.2

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Challenges

• Task selection, work breakdown and distributionof labor

• Domain selection and creation of knowledgecorpus

• Deriving formal representations from user inputs

• Technology design• Intrinsic motivations

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Factors affecting participation

• prize is higher• participants are more intrinsically motivated ,

have more free time, are non-experts in the field , and are not participating due to career concerns, social motivations, or to beat others.

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(Lakhani et al, 2007)

Outline of the tutorialTime Presentation

09:00 – 09:30 Human contributions in semantic content authoring

09:30 – 10:30 Methods and techniques to analyze and design incentivized semantic applications

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 12:30 Guidelines for incentivized technology design

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch break

13:30 – 14:30 Casual games for semantic content creation

14:30 – 15:00 Hands-on (Part I)

15:00 – 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 – 17:00 Hands-on (Part II)

17:00 – 17:30 Wrap-up and closing

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8/10/2011 www.insemtives.eu 18

Realizing the Semantic Web by encouraging millions of end-users

to create semantic content.