Wikispeedia: An Online Game for Inferring Semantic Distances between Concepts

Computing the semantic distance between real-world concepts is crucial for many intelligent applications. We present a novel method that leverages data from `Wikispeedia', an online game played on Wikipedia; players have to reach an article from another, unrelated article, only by clicking links in the articles encountered. In order to automatically infer semantic distances between everyday concepts, our method effectively extracts the common sense displayed by humans during play, and is thus more desirable, from a cognitive point of view, than purely corpus-based methods. We show that our method significantly outperforms Latent Semantic Analysis in a psychometric evaluation of the quality of learned semantic distances.

Robert West, Joelle Pineau, Doina Precup