Cost-Effective Quality Assurance in Crowd Labeling

Information Systems Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 137-158

53 Pages Posted: 13 Aug 2014 Last revised: 19 Jul 2018

See all articles by Jing Wang

Jing Wang

Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis

New York University - Leonard N. Stern School of Business

Foster Provost

New York University (NYU) - Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences

Date Written: June 3, 2016

Abstract

The emergence of online paid micro-crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), allows on-demand and at scale distribution of tasks to human workers around the world. In such settings, online workers come and complete small tasks posted by an employer, working for as long or as little as they wish, a process that eliminates the overhead of the hiring (and dismissal). This flexibility introduces a different set of inefficiencies: verifying the quality of every submitted piece of work is an expensive operation, which often requires the same level of effort as performing the task itself. A number of research challenges arise in such settings. How can we ensure that the submitted work is accurate? What allocation strategies can be employed to make the best use of the available labor force? How to appropriately assess the performance of individual workers? In this paper, we consider labeling tasks and develop a comprehensive scheme for managing the quality of crowd labeling: First, we present several algorithms for inferring the true classes of objects and the quality of participating workers, assuming the labels are collected all at once before the inference. Next, we allow employers to adaptively decide which object to assign to the next arriving worker and propose several heuristic-based dynamic label allocation strategies to achieve the desired data quality with significantly fewer labels. Experimental results on both simulated and real data confirm the superior performance of the proposed allocation strategies over other existing policies. Finally, we introduce two novel metrics that can be used to objectively rank the performance of crowdsourced workers, after fixing correctable worker errors and taking into account the costs of different classification errors. In particular, the worker value metric directly measures the monetary value contributed by each label of the worker towards meeting the quality requirements and may provide a basis for the design of fair and efficient compensation schemes.

Keywords: crowd labeling, quality assurance, dynamic label allocation, worker performance metric

Suggested Citation

Wang, Jing and Ipeirotis, Panagiotis G. and Provost, Foster, Cost-Effective Quality Assurance in Crowd Labeling (June 3, 2016). Information Systems Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 137-158, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2479845

Jing Wang (Contact Author)

Hong Kong University of Science & Technology ( email )

Lee Shau Kee Business Building
Clearwater Bay
Kowloon
Hong Kong

HOME PAGE: http://www.bm.ust.hk/isom/faculty-and-staff/directory/jwang

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis

New York University - Leonard N. Stern School of Business ( email )

44 West Fourth Street
Ste 8-84
New York, NY 10012
United States
+1-212-998-0803 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~panos

Foster Provost

New York University (NYU) - Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences ( email )

44 West Fourth Street
New York, NY 10012
United States

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