Gamifying Natural Language Acquisition : A quantitative study on Swedish antonyms while examining the effects of consensus driven rewards
Abstract: Little research has been done on antonymic relations, a great deal of this has been done by linguists Paradis et al. Gamification was used in natural language acquisition by Bos and Nissim in their 2015 study about noun-noun compound relations, but gamification of information retrieval remains a relatively new field of study. This thesis reproduced work done by Paradis et al. in an attempt to answer the following questions for Swedish antonyms: will reversing word order in antonymic relations affect the strength of said word pair? Will the perceived strength of canonical antonyms have a lower variance than that of non-canonical antonyms? It will also examine whether giving points depending on the agreement with other users reduce the occurrence of extreme points on an ordinal scale? Two parallel studies were conducted, one using a web app which implemented consensus driven rewards, and another utilising a questionnaire. Reversing the order of the words did not to alter the perceived strength of the antonymic pair, which is consistent with the results acquired by Paradis et al. in 2009. Results regarding variance of canonical and non-canonical antonym pairs were inconclusive. An implementation with consensus driven rewards yielded more extreme values than the questionnaire. More research is suggested to improve the strength of the results.
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