Team word-guessing games where one player, the clue-giver, gives clues attempting to elicit a target-word from another player, the receiver, are a popular form of entertainment and also used for educational purposes. Creating an engaging computational agent capable of emulating a talented human clue-giver in a timed word-guessing game depends on the ability to provide effective clues (clues able to elicit a correct guess from a human receiver). There are many available web resources and databases that can be mined for the raw material for clues for target-words; however, a large number of those clues are unlikely to be able to elicit a correct guess from a human guesser. In this paper, we propose a method for automatically filtering a clue corpus for effective clues for an arbitrary target-word from a larger set of potential clues, using machine learning on a set of features of the clues, including point-wise mutual information between a clue’s constituent words and a clue’s target-word. The results of the experiments significantly improve the average clue quality over previous approaches, and bring quality rates in-line with measures of human clue quality derived from a corpus of human-human interactions. The paper also introduces the data used to develop this method; audio recordings of people making guesses after having heard the clues being spoken by a synthesized voice.
@InProceedings{PINCUS16.762,
author = {Eli Pincus and David Traum}, title = {Towards Automatic Identification of Effective Clues for Team Word-Guessing Games}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper