Frequently Asked Questions

What are the game rules?

How will my contribution be used?

Can I help without doing any work?

I'm an educator; can I use your site as a teaching aid?

I'm a researcher; can I download the data you have gathered?

Where do your sentences come from?

Troubleshooting:

I logged in, but keep coming up as 'anonymous'. What's wrong?

You are provided with a list of sentences that include one word (in red) which has several possible meanings. To play the game, you select the most appropriate meaning for this word for each given sentence.

For each "tagged" sentence, you receive 10 points. If you tag enough sentences and your score exceeds the record of the current champion (shown on the blue status line between word definitions and the sentences), you will enter the "Hall of Fame" as the new champion for this word.

Some words are harder, some are easier. You can select which word you want to play from the "jump to word" drop-down box near the "Submit" button.

You can skip any sentence you're unsure about. To return to the skipped sentences, simply jump to the word you are playing using the same drop-down box.

The knowledge submitted by all teachers collectively is being made freely available for use by scientists around the world.

This effort contributes to computers being able to understand people better (smarter interfaces, FAQs, search engines) and to people speaking different languages being able to communicate better (machine translation).

Yes! You can link to us from your site!

We will raffle off prizes (excellent "Open Mind" T-shirts) among those that link to us. By placing a link on your homepage or wherever is appropriate, you will be helping make computers better at understanding people.

If you link to us, please send us an email with the subject: linked to your site, and, in the body of the message provide your username and the URL where you placed the link to us. (That way, we know whom to give the prize to if you win!)

See buttons.html for some text and buttons you can use.

Yes, Open Mind Word Expert is easy to use as an entertaining and useful way to instruct high school and college students.

At our site, students can get a practical feel for word meanings, word senses, how sentences can influence them, and the issues that come in lexical semantics and natural language processing.

To use our site as a teaching aid simply follow these steps:

1. Create a new project at the special project page. Remember the "project name" you select. Do not share the password you select.
2. Tell the project participants to come to http://teach-computers.org and create an account at the usual login page. When entering their profile (on the screen after the login), the students should enter the project name you've selected.
3. You, the project administrator, can monitor the participation of everyone in your project by logging in at any time at the project page. For a sample project summary, see the existing project named "sample", using the password "sample".

You can download the sense tagged data collected during the first year of activity. The data set includes annotated examples for 288 nouns. More details about this corpus are available from our research publications.

All the data collected through this site will be made available for the Senseval-3 evaluation exercise in Spring 2004. Starting with Spring 2004, all data collected through this site will be in the public domain; if you want to receive a notice from us when the data becomes available, please send us an email.

We are using what is called active learning. That is, we are asking you to select meanings for sentences that we are particularly unsure about. We have run two computer programs that tag words with their senses, and selected the sentences where the two programs disagreed.

The word meaning examples that we use are random selections from Open Mind Commonsense, Penn Treebank and L.A. Times.

Some of the sentences come from another project that lets people contribute their knowledge, Open Mind Commonsense. Take a look, that is a very interesting project too!

"Cookies" must be turned on in your browser. Cookies are used only to let the game know who you are and which word you are currently playing.