Gencay K. Evirgen

Words Around: Ontology Population Using Human Computation Gencay K. Evirgen

In recent years, many researchers have developed new techniques on ontology population. However, these methods cannot overcome the semantic gap between humans and the extracted ontologies. Words Around is a web application that forms a user-friendly environment which channels the vast Internet population to provide data towards solving ontology population problem that no known efficient computer algorithms can yet solve. This application's fundamental data structure is a list of words that people naturally link to each other. It displays these lists as a word cloud that is fun to drag around and play with. Users are prompted to enter whatever word comes to their mind upon seeing a word that is suggested from the application's database; or they can search for one word in particular to see what associations other users have made to it. Once logged in, users can view their activity history, which words they were the first to associate, and mark particular words as misspellings or as junk, to help keep the list's structure to be relevant and accurate.