Gaming for language services

Abstract

Service-oriented computing environments (SoCEs) such as the Language Grid can be regarded as the synthesis of their individual services. However, to make sustainable SoCEs, the user will want assurance that the billing structure is valid of and apportionment of cost burden among users is fair. To analyze the factors involved, we conduct donation and investment games for a machine translation service, where the service users participate in gaming. The results confirm the existence of users that actively try to make donations and social investments, users that remain passive to this kind of service, as well as users who tend to free ride on other users. Furthermore, we find that setting bonuses based on the total amount of donation and investment is effective in incentivizing some players to donate and invest. We also show how to reduce the cost of developing and executing gaming exercises for domain practitioners or experts. We define a game as a workflow of collaborative tasks executed by players. We develop game definition criteria to simplify game descriptions. We develop a gaming environment that enables web-based games to be implemented by using the game definitions.