Short Bio:

Massimo Poesio is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester (USA) in 1994, and was a EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh from 1994-2001, and a professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Trento.  He is a cognitive scientist with a particular focus on human language technology; his research interests include computational models of semantic interpretation, particularly anaphora resolution; the creation of large corpora of semantically annotated data, also using games-with-a-purpose (www.phrasedetectives.org); the study of conceptual knowledge using a combination of methods from human language technology and from neuroscience; and deception detection.

Website: http://csee.essex.ac.uk/staff/poesio

What Crowdsourcing Tells Us about Cognition: the Case of Anaphora

Crowdsourcing is usually seen primarily as an inexpensive and quick way of creating large resources for a variety of Artificial Intelligence tasks. However, our work with Phrase Detectives, a game-with-a-purpose designed to collect data about anaphora, suggests that collecting large numbers of judgments about very large amounts of data also tells us a lot about the extent to which human subjects agree or disagree about the interpretation of such data. In the talk I will introduce Phrase Detectives and discuss our results and their implications.