Toward a comprehension challenge, using crowdsourcing as a tool

Abstract

Human readers comprehend vastly more, and in vastly different ways, than any existing comprehension test would suggest. An ideal comprehension test for a story should cover the full range of questions and answers that humans would expect other humans to reasonably learn or infer from a given story. As a step toward these goals we propose a novel test, the crowdsourced comprehension challenge (C3), which is constructed by repeated runs of a three-person game, the Iterative Crowdsourced Comprehension Game (ICCG). ICCG uses structured crowdsourcing to comprehensively generate relevant questions and supported answers for arbitrary stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, presented across a variety of media such as videos, podcasts, and still images.