Crowdsourcing has been widely adopted to perform large projects suitable for human participation, in which tasks are usually distributed to workers. Many such projects involve classification/labeling certain collections of items through semisupervised clustering, in which queries on small subsets of the items are assigned to workers in the crowd. The answers are collected by a taskmaster and the goal is to fully recover the labels. This problem can be modeled as a sparsely encoded source coding problem, where each query answer, regarded as a code bit, is the XOR of a small number of labels, as source information bits. While the problem of designing compression/source coding schemes achieving Shannon’s optimal compression rate is very well-studied, a few have considered sparsely encoded schemes. In this paper we leverage the connections between this problem and well-studied codes with sparse representations for the channel coding problem to provide querying schemes with almost optimal number of queries, each of which involving only a constant number of labels. We also extend this scenario to the case where some workers can be unresponsive. For this case, we propose querying schemes where each query involves only log n items, where n is the total number of items to be labeled. Furthermore, we consider classification of two correlated labeling systems and provide two-stage querying schemes with almost optimal number of queries each involving a constant number of labels.
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Bayesian Decision Process for Budget-efficient Crowdsourced Clustering
The performance of clustering depends on an appropriately defined similarity between two items. When the similarity is measured based on human perception, human workers are often employed to estimate a similarity score between items in order to support clustering, leading to a procedure called crowdsourced clustering. Assuming a monetary reward is paid to a worker for each similarity score and assuming the similarities between pairs and workers' reliability have a large diversity, when the budget is limited, it is critical to wisely assign pairs of items to different workers to optimize the clustering result. We model this budget allocation problem as a Markov decision process where item pairs are dynamically assigned to workers based on the historical similarity scores they provided. We propose an optimistic knowledge gradient policy where the assignment of items in each stage is based on the minimum-weight K-cut defined on a similarity graph. We provide simulation studies and real data analysis to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845444
- PAR ID:
- 10203136
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2044 to 2050
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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