The VerbCorner Project

Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven’t worked out the exact meanings for most words. This is a serious problem if you want to train computers to understand language. If we don’t know what words mean, it’s hard to teach computers what they mean. It is similarly hard to understand how children come learn the meanings of words, when we don’t fully understand those meanings ourselves.

Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of separate tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory – which we hope you enjoy! – but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of meaning.

You can participate for as little as a few minutes or come back to the site over and over to help code the many thousands of words in English.