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.