2,614 research outputs found
Does Confidence Reporting from the Crowd Benefit Crowdsourcing Performance?
We explore the design of an effective crowdsourcing system for an -ary
classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose
results are aggregated to give the final classification decision. We consider
the scenario where the workers have a reject option so that they are allowed to
skip microtasks when they are unable to or choose not to respond to binary
microtasks. Additionally, the workers report quantized confidence levels when
they are able to submit definitive answers. We present an aggregation approach
using a weighted majority voting rule, where each worker's response is assigned
an optimized weight to maximize crowd's classification performance. We obtain a
couterintuitive result that the classification performance does not benefit
from workers reporting quantized confidence. Therefore, the crowdsourcing
system designer should employ the reject option without requiring confidence
reporting.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, SocialSens 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:1602.0057
Optimal Crowdsourced Classification with a Reject Option in the Presence of Spammers
We explore the design of an effective crowdsourcing system for an -ary
classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose
results are aggregated to give the final decision. We consider the scenario
where the workers have a reject option so that they are allowed to skip
microtasks when they are unable to or choose not to respond to binary
microtasks. We present an aggregation approach using a weighted majority voting
rule, where each worker's response is assigned an optimized weight to maximize
crowd's classification performance.Comment: submitted to ICASSP 201
Gradient descent for sparse rank-one matrix completion for crowd-sourced aggregation of sparsely interacting workers
We consider worker skill estimation for the singlecoin
Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In
practice skill-estimation is challenging because
worker assignments are sparse and irregular due
to the arbitrary, and uncontrolled availability of
workers. We formulate skill estimation as a
rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem,
where the observed components correspond to
observed label correlation between workers. We
show that the correlation matrix can be successfully
recovered and skills identifiable if and only
if the sampling matrix (observed components) is
irreducible and aperiodic. We then propose an
efficient gradient descent scheme and show that
skill estimates converges to the desired global optima
for such sampling matrices. Our proof is
original and the results are surprising in light of
the fact that even the weighted rank-one matrix
factorization problem is NP hard in general. Next
we derive sample complexity bounds for the noisy
case in terms of spectral properties of the signless
Laplacian of the sampling matrix. Our proposed
scheme achieves state-of-art performance on a
number of real-world datasets.Published versio
Time-Sensitive Bayesian Information Aggregation for Crowdsourcing Systems
Crowdsourcing systems commonly face the problem of aggregating multiple
judgments provided by potentially unreliable workers. In addition, several
aspects of the design of efficient crowdsourcing processes, such as defining
worker's bonuses, fair prices and time limits of the tasks, involve knowledge
of the likely duration of the task at hand. Bringing this together, in this
work we introduce a new time--sensitive Bayesian aggregation method that
simultaneously estimates a task's duration and obtains reliable aggregations of
crowdsourced judgments. Our method, called BCCTime, builds on the key insight
that the time taken by a worker to perform a task is an important indicator of
the likely quality of the produced judgment. To capture this, BCCTime uses
latent variables to represent the uncertainty about the workers' completion
time, the tasks' duration and the workers' accuracy. To relate the quality of a
judgment to the time a worker spends on a task, our model assumes that each
task is completed within a latent time window within which all workers with a
propensity to genuinely attempt the labelling task (i.e., no spammers) are
expected to submit their judgments. In contrast, workers with a lower
propensity to valid labeling, such as spammers, bots or lazy labelers, are
assumed to perform tasks considerably faster or slower than the time required
by normal workers. Specifically, we use efficient message-passing Bayesian
inference to learn approximate posterior probabilities of (i) the confusion
matrix of each worker, (ii) the propensity to valid labeling of each worker,
(iii) the unbiased duration of each task and (iv) the true label of each task.
Using two real-world public datasets for entity linking tasks, we show that
BCCTime produces up to 11% more accurate classifications and up to 100% more
informative estimates of a task's duration compared to state-of-the-art
methods
Cheaper and Better: Selecting Good Workers for Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing provides a popular paradigm for data collection at scale. We
study the problem of selecting subsets of workers from a given worker pool to
maximize the accuracy under a budget constraint. One natural question is
whether we should hire as many workers as the budget allows, or restrict on a
small number of top-quality workers. By theoretically analyzing the error rate
of a typical setting in crowdsourcing, we frame the worker selection problem
into a combinatorial optimization problem and propose an algorithm to solve it
efficiently. Empirical results on both simulated and real-world datasets show
that our algorithm is able to select a small number of high-quality workers,
and performs as good as, sometimes even better than, the much larger crowds as
the budget allows
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