# Semantic Similarity Word Game Powered by Rosette **Author:** Paul Flamburis **Published:** Jan 25, 2023 --- _By Paul Flamburis_ Everybody loves games, which is why word games are such a valuable way to demonstrate NLP concepts. At Hackathon 2022, Team 3 decided to create their own Rosette -powered guess-the-word game based on semantic similarity. _ From left to right: Ethan Roseman, Fiona Hasanaj, Chini Sinha, Ian Redpath, Harjas Sarna_ The current word game craze was started by Josh Wardle when he created [_Wordle_](https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html) in 2021. Even if you haven’t played it, you’ve still probably heard of this game, which gives you six chances to guess a new five-letter word each day. After each guess, the game provides feedback based on the letters used. That game reached the height of its popularity in February 2022, but also inspired a legion of imitators such as [_Lingle_](https://www.thewordfinder.com/6-letter-wordle/), [_Quordle_](https://www.quordle.com/#/), and even [_Lordle of the Rings_](https://digitaltolkien.github.io/vue-wordle/), which is a variant of Wordle that only includes five-letter words and names from the main text of J. R. R. Tolkien’s _The Lord of the Rings_. Team 3 was most interested in a game called _Semantle_. [_Semantle_](https://semantle.com/), created by David Turner, is a take on the _Wordle_ formula that provides feedback based on the semantic similarity of the guess to the hidden word, rather than spelling. [Semantic similarity](https://www.rosette.com/capability/semantic-similarity/#overview) is the likeness of meaning between words. For example, the word “dog” has higher semantic similarity to the word “cat” than it does to the word “table.” Automated semantic similarity measurement is made possible thanks to a recent natural language processing innovation called word embeddings. Word embeddings are numerical representations (called vectors) of words and their position in vector space. Long story short: the closer two word vectors are, the more similar in meaning the corresponding words. Word embeddings help to quantify a conceptual problem, and without them, games like _Semantle_ wouldn’t be able to tell you how close each of your guesses was to the hidden word of the day. It just so happens that Rosette has its own word embeddings which drive things like our semantic similarity endpoint. Since the word game craze is still so fresh in the cultural zeitgeist, Team 3 had the idea to recreate _Semantle_ using Rosette’s internal word embeddings. The game would then serve as an interactive demonstration of those word embeddings. Even with _Semantle_ as a design template, making a game is no simple task, and what makes this project even more impressive is the fact that the team consisted almost entirely of back-end engineers. In two and a half days, the team not only had to build a functional game, but learn to make user interfaces with React on the fly, making this a front-end underdog story for the ages. By all appearances, however, nobody on the team let the stress get to them. The members of Team 3 recall having excellent delegation of responsibility, easy communication, and a whole lot of fun. Team 3 dubbed their game _RVECle_, short for Rosette Vector with the “-le” suffix characteristic of the _Wordle_-clone genre. (That’s not a knock, either, as anyone who remembers first-person games being called _Doom_-clones can tell you.) Team 3’s post-Hackathon presentation included an interactive segment with a reveal that wowed the audience: _RVECle _was already playable both on computers and mobile devices. It’s one thing to hear about how successful a Hackathon project was, but it was another thing entirely to be able to play it firsthand. The clean and responsive UI was proof that all of Team 3’s front-end learning paid off, and by the end of the day people were already wondering when the next day’s word would drop. It’s no wonder, then, that Team 3 walked away from the Hackathon with the Audience Choice Award. One feature that separates _RVECle _from _Semantle_ is that _RVECle _is multilingual. While there are versions of _Semantle_ in other languages, _RVECle_ includes English, Hebrew, Japanese, and more. The team wasn’t content to rest in Semantle’s shadow for long, however; they already have ideas for a suite of new and unique game modes that could separate them from the pack. “Tip of my Tongue” would ask the player to guess a hidden word given four other words with high semantic similarity. “Antonymle” would require you to guess a hidden word and its most semantically dissimilar word. In “Semiddlele,” the goal is to guess a hidden word that is semantically equidistant from two provided words. These game ideas, aside from sounding fun, are all fresh approaches to demonstrating the concept of semantic distance. With any luck, the members of Team 3 will return to the world of word game development and make them reality.