Phrase Detectives - The AnaWiki annotation game

Welcome to Phrase Detectives

Lovers of literature, grammar and language, this is the place where you can work together to improve future generations of technology. By indicating relationships between words and phrases you will help to create a resource that is rich in linguistic information.

Detective tasks

You must search for relationships between words and phrases in a piece of text.

1) NAME THE CULPRIT
You will be given a word or phrase and you must look for any evidence of it appearing earlier in the text. An example of this would be:

Sherlink Holmes went to the shop. He got some tobacco for his pipe.

The word in orange refers to "Sherlink Holmes".

2) DETECTIVES CONFERENCE
You will be asked whether you agree with another detective's decision. An example of this would be:

Sherlink Holmes went to the shop. It was closed.

The word in orange refers to the phrase in blue so you should agree with this decision.
Further instructions

Scoring points & medals

In the Name The Culprit task you must decide if a phrase has been mentioned before. Your decision will be examined in the Detectives Conference and you will receive extra points the more that other detectives agree with you.

When you are invited to the Detectives Conference you will receive bonus points for agreeing with other detectives. Click on the points box during the game to find out more about your score.

Weekly and monthly high scores are rewarded with medals.
Further instructions

Join the detective team

Simply provide a username and password and you can get started.
You will be given a short training task to check you have understood the instructions and so you can get the hang of the game.
Register here

Are you a writer?

Would you like your stories added to our game and read by other detectives? We are looking for original texts to add to the game and to become a part of our corpus.
More details

Detective's Bulletin

03 Nov 08

Writer Tom Lee, author of Greenfly, has submitted his unpublished short story Perfect Yoga to the game.

01 Nov 08

Congratulations to trelex who was October's highest scorer.

28 Oct 08

Read coglanglab's excellent article about Phrase Detectives.

19 Sept 08

Phrase Detectives will be presented at the STEP conference in Italy.

28 Aug 08

Phrase Detectives will be presented at the iSemantics conference in Austria.

22 Aug 08

Phrase Detectives is released for public beta testing. If you come across any problems please submit them on the feedback page.

Coming Soon

During the Autumn of 2008 we will be building on the beta version of the game to allow you more control and feedback.

We will be developing an application to link the game to Facebook so you can compete with your friends. Join our Facebook group to find out more.

If you have any suggestions please feel free to send them via the feedback page.