TurKit: human computation algorithms on mechanical turk

  • Authors:
  • Greg Little;Lydia B. Chilton;Max Goldman;Robert C. Miller

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) provides an on-demand source of human computation. This provides a tremendous opportunity to explore algorithms which incorporate human computation as a function call. However, various systems challenges make this difficult in practice, and most uses of MTurk post large numbers of independent tasks. TurKit is a toolkit for prototyping and exploring algorithmic human computation, while maintaining a straight-forward imperative programming style. We present the crash-and-rerun programming model that makes TurKit possible, along with a variety of applications for human computation algorithms. We also present case studies of TurKit used for real experiments across different fields.