Know Your Nyms is available to play on Lingo Boingo's website. To participate, click here.
Know Your Nyms is a fun, fast-paced language game with a purpose (GWAP) that focuses on semantic relations between words. In each round, participants are asked to list as many words as they can in a set amount of time that answer a specific prompt. Examples include: “What are parts of an apple?” or “What is another word for taut?”. Know Your Nyms prompts are centered around “base words”, and participants are asked to find their synonyms (same meaning) , antonyms (opposite meaning), hyponyms (a more specific term than the base word), and meronyms (parts composing a whole). Participants submit as many words as they can that answer the prompt before the timer goes down and the round ends. After the round is over, they are scored based on how their answers match with other participant’s answers. The gameplay is similar to the game show Family Feud, where the goal is to guess popular responses to survey questions.
Know Your Nyms collects a large number of human-judged lexical and semantic relationships so that researchers can learn more about how people understand them and use that information to strengthen language technologies that classify and analyze texts. Participants can provide high quality data that computers or automatic systems can’t accurately reproduce.
Lingo Boingo's homepage: Know Your Nyms is located in the middle of the bottom row.
When participants click on the Know Your Nyms icon on Lingo Boingo's homepage, they are connected to the Know Your Nyms website.
Game Components
There are three components of the website, the welcome screen, the game page, and the scoring page.
Welcome Screen
This screen has five buttons displayed: a "Sign In" button where participants create a username needed to play the game, a "How to Play" button, an "About the Team" button, a "Leaderboards" button, and a "Start Round" button. Additionally, there are also 4 boxes for "synonyms", "antonyms", "hyponyms", and "meronyms" which users can check and uncheck depending on what types of prompts they want to be given during gameplay.
Screenshot of Know Your Nyms welcome page
Game Page
This screen displays a prompt, a text entry box for typing in your answers, and a timer that immediately starts counting down. After participants type a word in the text box, they can press the tab or enter button to type another word. When the timer runs out, the scoring page automatically opens and participants can then view their scores and see how similar their answers were to other participants.
Screenshot of Know Your Nyms game page and an example prompt
Scoring Page
This page displays a table listing the words the participant entered, the percentage of other participants who also answered those words, how many bonus points they got based on matching words that appear in the WordNet database, and what their total score is when the previous two categories are combined. The scoring page also displays a bar graph that shows the top participant answers for that prompt. Participants can view which semantic relations they identified and compare it to other participants.
Screenshot of Know Your Nyms scoring page, table, and graph showing results for an example answer.
Leaderboard and High Scores
Located on the Know Your Nyms homepage, the leaderboard displays high scores of participants based on different categories such as highest average score per round, greatest number of rounds played, and highest total score.
Head to Lingo Boingo to play Know Your Nyms and other fun language games, and make sure to check out Lingo Boingo's Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Sources
Mechanic, R., Fulgoni, D., Cutler, H., Liu, Z., Jackson, B., Cocos, A., Callison-Burch, C., &
Apidianaki, M. (n.d.). KnowYourNyms? A Game of Semantic Relationships. Penn
Engineering Computer and Information Science.