We describe Quizz, a gamified crowdsourcing system that simultaneously assesses the knowledge of users and acquires new knowledge from them. Quizz operates by asking users to complete short quizzes on specific topics; as a user answers the quiz questions, Quizz estimates the user's competence. To acquire new knowledge, Quizz also incorporates questions for which we do not have a known answer; the answers given by competent users provide useful signals for selecting the correct answers for these questions. Quizz actively tries to identify knowledgeable users on the Internet by running advertising campaigns, effectively leveraging the targeting capabilities of existing, publicly available, ad placement services. Quizz quantifies the contributions of the users using information theory and sends feedback to the advertisingsystem about each user. The feedback allows the ad targeting mechanism to further optimize ad placement. Our experiments, which involve over ten thousand users, confirm that we can crowdsource knowledge curation for niche and specialized topics, as the advertising network can automatically identify users with the desired expertise and interest in the given topic. We present controlled experiments that examine the effect of various incentive mechanisms, highlighting the need for having short-term rewards as goals, which incentivize the users to contribute. Finally, our cost-quality analysis indicates that the cost of our approach is below that of hiring workers through paid-crowdsourcing platforms, while offering the additional advantage of giving access to billions of potential users all over the planet, and being able to reach users with specialized expertise that is not typically available through existing labor marketplaces.
In our work, we explicitly assess the competence of users with calibration questions. Alternatively, we can use unsupervised techniques for estimating the competence of users, through redundancy. Dawid and Skene @cite_7 presented an EM algorithm to estimate the quality of the participants in the absence of known ground truth, and a large number of recent papers examined the same topic @cite_24 @cite_20 @cite_33 improving significantly the state of the art. Being closer to our work, @cite_2 also use a Markov Decision Process, in order to decide whether the answers provided by a user are promising enough to warrant a hiring decision. In the future, we plan to use these algorithms for quality inference together with our exploration exploitation approach, to decide optimally how to combine assessment with knowledge acquisition. A key challenge is being able to provide immediate feedback to the users, when the questions have no certain answer.
@cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_24 @cite_2 @cite_20
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Distributing labeling tasks among hundreds or thousands of annotators is an increasingly important method for annotating large datasets. We present a method for estimating the underlying value (e.g. the class) of each image from (noisy) annotations provided by multiple annotators. Our method is based on a model of the image formation and annotation process. Each image has different characteristics that are represented in an abstract Euclidean space. Each annotator is modeled as a multidimensional entity with variables representing competence, expertise and bias. This allows the model to discover and represent groups of annotators that have different sets of skills and knowledge, as well as groups of images that differ qualitatively. We find that our model predicts ground truth labels on both synthetic and real data more accurately than state of the art methods. Experiments also show that our model, starting from a set of binary labels, may discover rich information, such as different "schools of thought" amongst the annotators, and can group together images belonging to separate categories. In compiling a patient record many facets are subject to errors of measurement. A model is presented which allows individual error-rates to be estimated for polytomous facets even when the patient's "true" response is not available. The EM algorithm is shown to provide a slow but sure way of obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of interest. Some preliminary experience is reported and the limitations of the method are described. For many supervised learning tasks it may be infeasible (or very expensive) to obtain objective and reliable labels. Instead, we can collect subjective (possibly noisy) labels from multiple experts or annotators. In practice, there is a substantial amount of disagreement among the annotators, and hence it is of great practical interest to address conventional supervised learning problems in this scenario. In this paper we describe a probabilistic approach for supervised learning when we have multiple annotators providing (possibly noisy) labels but no absolute gold standard. The proposed algorithm evaluates the different experts and also gives an estimate of the actual hidden labels. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the commonly used majority voting baseline. We show how machine learning and inference can be harnessed to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and computational agents to solve crowdsourcing tasks. We construct a set of Bayesian predictive models from data and describe how the models operate within an overall crowd-sourcing architecture that combines the efforts of people and machine vision on the task of classifying celestial bodies defined within a citizens' science project named Galaxy Zoo. We show how learned probabilistic models can be used to fuse human and machine contributions and to predict the behaviors of workers. We employ multiple inferences in concert to guide decisions on hiring and routing workers to tasks so as to maximize the efficiency of large-scale crowdsourcing processes based on expected utility. Modern machine learning-based approaches to computer vision require very large databases of hand labeled images. Some contemporary vision systems already require on the order of millions of images for training (e.g., Omron face detector [9]). New Internet-based services allow for a large number of labelers to collaborate around the world at very low cost. However, using these services brings interesting theoretical and practical challenges: (1) The labelers may have wide ranging levels of expertise which are unknown a priori, and in some cases may be adversarial; (2) images may vary in their level of difficulty; and (3) multiple labels for the same image must be combined to provide an estimate of the actual label of the image. Probabilistic approaches provide a principled way to approach these problems. In this paper we present a probabilistic model and use it to simultaneously infer the label of each image, the expertise of each labeler, and the difficulty of each image. On both simulated and real data, we demonstrate that the model outperforms the commonly used "Majority Vote" heuristic for inferring image labels, and is robust to both noisy and adversarial labelers.