4,511 research outputs found
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
A Cognitive-based scheme for user reliability and expertise assessment in Q&A social networks
Q&A social media has gained a great deal of attention during recent years. People rely on these sites to obtain information due to the number of advantages they offer as compared to conventional sources of knowledge (e.g., asynchronous and convenient access). However, for the same question one may find highly contradictory answers, causing ambiguity with respect to the correct information. This can be attributed to the presence of unreliable and/or non-expert users. In this work, we propose a novel approach for estimating the reliability and expertise of a user based on human cognitive traits. Every user can individually estimate these values based on local pairwise interactions. We examine the convergence performance of our algorithm and we find that it can accurately assess the reliability and the expertise of a user and can successfully react to the latter's behavior change. © 2011 IEEE
Rationality, pragmatics, and sources
This thesis contributes to the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science. It
introduces and explores a triangular scheme for understanding the relationship
between rationality and two key abilities: pragmatics – roughly, inferring implicit
intended utterance meanings – and learning from sources. The thesis argues that
these three components – rationality, pragmatics, and sources – should be considered
together: that each one informs the others. The thesis makes this case through
literature review and theoretical work (principally, in Chapters 1 and 8) and through
a series of empirical chapters focusing on different parts of the triangular scheme.
Chapters 2 to 4 address the relationship between pragmatics and sources, focusing on
how people change their beliefs when they read a conditional with a partially reliable
source. The data bear on theories of the conditional and on the literature assessing
people’s rationality with conditionals. Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between
rationality and pragmatics, focusing on conditionals ‘in action’ in a framing effect
known as goal framing. The data suggest a complex relationship between pragmatics
and utilities, and support a new approach to goal framing. Chapter 6 addresses the
relationship between rationality and sources, using normative Bayesian models to
explore how people respond to simple claims from sources of different reliabilities.
The data support a two-way relationship between claims and source information and,
perhaps most strikingly, suggest that people readily treat sources as ‘anti-reliable’: as
negatively correlated with the truth. Chapter 7 extends these experiments to test the
theory that speakers can guard against reputational damage using hedging. The data
do not support this theory, and raise questions about whether trust and vigilance
against deception are prerequisites for pragmatics. Lastly, Chapter 8 synthesizes the
results; argues for new ways of understanding the relationships between rationality, pragmatics, and sources; and relates the findings to emerging formal methods in
psychology
The Skipping Behavior of Users of Music Streaming Services and its Relation to Musical Structure
The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the
point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the
main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users
stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution
of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in
time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown
that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also
independent of the cohort of users and, under stationary conditions, date of
observation. Finally, user behavioral data is used to train a predictor of the
musical structure of a song solely from its acoustic content; it is shown that
the use of such data, available in large quantities to music streaming
services, yields significant improvements in accuracy over the customary
fashion of training this class of algorithms, in which only smaller amounts of
hand-labeled data are available
A practical guide and software for analysing pairwise comparison experiments
Most popular strategies to capture subjective judgments from humans involve
the construction of a unidimensional relative measurement scale, representing
order preferences or judgments about a set of objects or conditions. This
information is generally captured by means of direct scoring, either in the
form of a Likert or cardinal scale, or by comparative judgments in pairs or
sets. In this sense, the use of pairwise comparisons is becoming increasingly
popular because of the simplicity of this experimental procedure. However, this
strategy requires non-trivial data analysis to aggregate the comparison ranks
into a quality scale and analyse the results, in order to take full advantage
of the collected data. This paper explains the process of translating pairwise
comparison data into a measurement scale, discusses the benefits and
limitations of such scaling methods and introduces a publicly available
software in Matlab. We improve on existing scaling methods by introducing
outlier analysis, providing methods for computing confidence intervals and
statistical testing and introducing a prior, which reduces estimation error
when the number of observers is low. Most of our examples focus on image
quality assessment.Comment: Code available at https://github.com/mantiuk/pwcm
Fidelity-Weighted Learning
Training deep neural networks requires many training samples, but in practice
training labels are expensive to obtain and may be of varying quality, as some
may be from trusted expert labelers while others might be from heuristics or
other sources of weak supervision such as crowd-sourcing. This creates a
fundamental quality versus-quantity trade-off in the learning process. Do we
learn from the small amount of high-quality data or the potentially large
amount of weakly-labeled data? We argue that if the learner could somehow know
and take the label-quality into account when learning the data representation,
we could get the best of both worlds. To this end, we propose
"fidelity-weighted learning" (FWL), a semi-supervised student-teacher approach
for training deep neural networks using weakly-labeled data. FWL modulates the
parameter updates to a student network (trained on the task we care about) on a
per-sample basis according to the posterior confidence of its label-quality
estimated by a teacher (who has access to the high-quality labels). Both
student and teacher are learned from the data. We evaluate FWL on two tasks in
information retrieval and natural language processing where we outperform
state-of-the-art alternative semi-supervised methods, indicating that our
approach makes better use of strong and weak labels, and leads to better
task-dependent data representations.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 201
Inter-Coder Agreement for Computational Linguistics
This article is a survey of methods for measuring agreement among corpus annotators. It exposes the mathematics and underlying assumptions of agreement coefficients, covering Krippendorff's alpha as well as Scott's pi and Cohen's kappa; discusses the use of coefficients in several annotation tasks; and argues that weighted, alpha-like coefficients, traditionally less used than kappa-like measures in computational linguistics, may be more appropriate for many corpus annotation tasks—but that their use makes the interpretation of the value of the coefficient even harder. </jats:p
Human-in-the-Loop Learning From Crowdsourcing and Social Media
Computational social studies using public social media data have become more and more popular because of the large amount of user-generated data available. The richness of social media data, coupled with noise and subjectivity, raise significant challenges for computationally studying social issues in a feasible and scalable manner. Machine learning problems are, as a result, often subjective or ambiguous when humans are involved. That is, humans solving the same problems might come to legitimate but completely different conclusions, based on their personal experiences and beliefs. When building supervised learning models, particularly when using crowdsourced training data, multiple annotations per data item are usually reduced to a single label representing ground truth. This inevitably hides a rich source of diversity and subjectivity of opinions about the labels.
Label distribution learning associates for each data item a probability distribution over the labels for that item, thus it can preserve diversities of opinions, beliefs, etc. that conventional learning hides or ignores. We propose a humans-in-the-loop learning framework to model and study large volumes of unlabeled subjective social media data with less human effort. We study various annotation tasks given to crowdsourced annotators and methods for aggregating their contributions in a manner that preserves subjectivity and disagreement. We introduce a strategy for learning label distributions with only five-to-ten labels per item by aggregating human-annotated labels over multiple, semantically related data items. We conduct experiments using our learning framework on data related to two subjective social issues (work and employment, and suicide prevention) that touch many people worldwide. Our methods can be applied to a broad variety of problems, particularly social problems. Our experimental results suggest that specific label aggregation methods can help provide reliable representative semantics at the population level
Machine learning for automatic prediction of the quality of electrophysiological recordings
The quality of electrophysiological recordings varies a lot due to technical and biological variability and neuroscientists inevitably have to select “good” recordings for further analyses. This procedure is time-consuming and prone to selection biases. Here, we investigate replacing human decisions by a machine learning approach. We define 16 features, such as spike height and width, select the most informative ones using a wrapper method and train a classifier to reproduce the judgement of one of our expert electrophysiologists. Generalisation performance is then assessed on unseen data, classified by the same or by another expert. We observe that the learning machine can be equally, if not more, consistent in its judgements as individual experts amongst each other. Best performance is achieved for a limited number of informative features; the optimal feature set being different from one data set to another. With 80–90% of correct judgements, the performance of the system is very promising within the data sets of each expert but judgments are less reliable when it is used across sets of recordings from different experts. We conclude that the proposed approach is relevant to the selection of electrophysiological recordings, provided parameters are adjusted to different types of experiments and to individual experimenters
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