Mechanical Turk and other “micro-outsourcing” platforms allow the easy collection of annotation data from a wide variety of onliner workers. Unfortunately, the results returned back from the workers are of imperfect quality: No worker is perfect and each worker commits different types of errors. Some workers are nothing more than spammers doing minimal, if any, real work.
The goal of this project is to create tools that allow requesters to infer the “true” results and the underlying quality of the workers, for a given task, by examining the labelers submitted by the workers.
The requesters will also be able to examine which workers are doing a good work for the given task, and reward these workers appropriately. The tool also provides the ability to detect spammers, allowing the requester to potentially block the spammer worker from working any future projects.
The ideas behind this work are described in Quality Management on Amazon Mechanical Turk, by Ipeirotis, Wang, and Provost, which was presented at HCOMP 2010.