Transcript
Page 1: Strata 2012: Humans, Machines, and the Dimensions of Microwork

1Recruiting SolutionsRecruiting SolutionsRecruiting Solutions

Humans, Machines, and theDimensions of Microwork

Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedInClaire Hunsaker, Samasource

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IdentityConnect, find and be foundLinkedIn Profile, Address Book, Search

InsightsBe great at what you doHomepage, LinkedIn Today, Groups

Work wherever our members work

EverywhereMobile, APIs, Plug-InsDesktop

Rolodex, Resume, Business Card

Newspapers,

Trade Magazines, Events

What is LinkedIn?

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How do Microworkers help Data Scientists?

Data Collection

Human Judgments as Training Data

Evaluation

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Quality Assurance

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Foreign University Research Project

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Stay Objective

vs.

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At What Price Independence?

Independent judgments enable statistical reasoning.– Can increase accuracy by requiring agreement of independent

workers on the same task.

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At What Price Independence?

Independent judgments enable statistical reasoning.– Can increase accuracy by requiring agreement of independent

workers on the same task.

But independent workers can’t help each other out.– No benefit from collaboration = less accurate workers.– Number of workers becomes bottleneck, and workers may be

incented to create fake alter egos.

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Add slide of workers helping each other out at delivery center

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At What Price Independence?

Independent judgments enable statistical reasoning.– Can increase accuracy by requiring agreement of independent

workers on the same task.

But independent workers can’t help each other out.– No benefit from collaboration = less accurate workers.– Number of workers becomes bottleneck, and workers may be

incented to create fake alter egos.

Market for lemons (Akerlof, 1970)

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Keep It Simple

Avoid unnecessary difficulty.– Provide clear instructions with examples.– Be transparent about what you’re trying to achieve.– Check an early sample of the work closely.– Set expectations on quality and accuracy and manage to those.

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Keep It Simple

Avoid unnecessary difficulty.– Provide clear instructions with examples– Be transparent about what you’re trying to achieve– Check an early sample of the work closely– Set expectations on quality and accuracy and manage to those

Trade-offs between task value and difficulty.– Easier to select from options than answer open-ended questions.– Even easier if there are only two options.– But open-ended questions leverage more intelligence.

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Keep It Simple

Avoid unnecessary difficulty.– Provide clear instructions with examples– Be transparent about what you’re trying to achieve– Check an early sample of the work closely– Set expectations on quality and accuracy and manage to those

Trade-offs between task value and difficulty.– Easier to select from options than answer open-ended questions.– Even easier if there are only two options.– But open-ended questions leverage more intelligence.

Watch out for systematic bias.– Even independent judges may make the same mistakes.– Especially if they use the same tools.

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Take Aways

Independent judgments are nice for some tasks, but not always worth the cost.

Keep crowdsourcing tasks as simple as possible.

Manage the trade-off between task value and difficulty.

Watch out for systematic bias.

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Questions?

Contact:

Daniel: [email protected]

Claire: [email protected]

We’re (both) hiring (a lot)!

Thank You!


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