Crowdsourcing the assembly of concept hierarchies

  • Authors:

  • Kai Eckert;Mathias Niepert;Christof Niemann;Cameron Buckner;Colin Allen;Heiner Stuckenschmidt

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany;University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany;University of Mannheim, Germany, Mannheim, Germany;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The "wisdom of crowds" is accomplishing tasks that are cumbersome for individuals yet cannot be fully automated by means of specialized computer algorithms. One such task is the construction of thesauri and other types of concept hierarchies. Human expert feedback on the relatedness and relative generality of terms, however, can be aggregated to dynamically construct evolving concept hierarchies. The InPhO (Indiana Philosophy Ontology) project bootstraps feedback from volunteer users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. The approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, we show that results of comparable quality can be achieved by leveraging the workforce of crowdsourcing services such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In an extensive empirical study, we compare the feedback obtained from AMT's workers with that from the InPhO volunteer users providing an insight into qualitative differences of the two groups. Furthermore, we present a set of strategies for assessing the quality of different users when gold standards are missing. We finally use these methods to construct a concept hierarchy based on the feedback acquired from AMT workers.