A Kids' Open Mind Common Sense

We propose a collaborative approach to the issue of resource creation for commonsense computing by developing a collaboratory application aimed at children. Human validation is enabled through a game-with-a-purpose (GWAP) interface, gathering reliability judgements of assertions that can be used to aid the process of resource validation. Our experiments confirm that children aged 10 to 12 can be valuable and reliable partners in building commonsense databases, due to their stage of mental development and their eagerness to play GWAPs. Results show that children adapt their word choice in the assertions they provide to the difficulty level of the stimuli words, and that the judgements gathered through in-game validation can help to validate about 30% of the gathered statements automatically.