PtiClic and PtiClic-Kids : word games for lexical acquisition by players and machine

This paper presents two lexical games, PtiClic and PtiClic-Kids, which are based on two lexical acquisition methods, namely Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and JeuxDeMots (JDM). We, first detail those two methods, which even if they both produce relations between terms, differ in several aspects: value, types, and directionality of the relations but also the way they are obtained. We present then the benefits of combining them in order to overcome their respective drawbacks. Secondly, we present how these games allow a lexical learning for the users and lexical relation acquisition for the computer. Finally, the overall architecture of the system and the obtained information are described as well as their benefit for research in NLP. Those games allow to gather data on age level for terms and may help to constitute such a lexicon, that would be very useful for applications like text generation.