Game with a Purpose Research Group:
Recently, Games With A Purpose (GWAP) has emerged as an interesting research area that is a sub-field of Human Computation. Games With A Purpose (GWAPs) utilizes human computation through letting users play games that are fun and then making use of the contributions submitted by players of these different Web gaming platforms in order to collect data.
The group aims at developing workbenches to support the Arabic language and to target Arabic speakers. This however, requires collecting various pictures of either the artworks or the architecture of the Arab world.
One of the suggested directions was to focus on the Arabic language and the different Arabic dialects. The variety of Arabic dialects reflects the ethnic and social diversity of its speakers. The different dialects present researchers with more challenges. One of the directions is to develop new games for collecting mappings between different Arabic dialects.
Another work direction is to do Linguistic Analysis on the collected data. This could be done by applying data mining techniques and clustering algorithms on the collected data to have interesting properties and features such as classifying users according to dialect features.
Another aim is to build an automatic machine translation system which would also require collecting a lot of mappings between different dialects. Consequently, proposals for crowdsourcing techniques to build such corpus are currently formalized.
A GWAP gaming platform targeted at tourists visiting Egyptian antique sites aiming at gathering photos and descriptions of these sites and their artifacts so as to build a semantic search engines on Egyptian antiques is also being developed. The platform will make it possible to upload their own photos, to annotate them as well as browsing through photos and annotation of other tourists either before or after their trip to Egypt or during their visits of Egyptian antique sites.