Pick-a-crowd: tell me what you like, and i'll tell you what to do

• Authors: Djellel Eddine Difallah;Gianluca Demartini;Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
• Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
• Year: 2013

Crowdsourcing allows to build hybrid online platforms that combine scalable information systems with the power of human intelligence to complete tasks that are difficult to tackle for current algorithms. Examples include hybrid database systems that use the crowd to fill missing values or to sort items according to subjective dimensions such as picture attractiveness. Current approaches to Crowdsourcing adopt a pull methodology where tasks are published on specialized Web platforms where workers can pick their preferred tasks on a first-come-first-served basis. While this approach has many advantages, such as simplicity and short completion times, it does not guarantee that the task is performed by the most suitable worker. In this paper, we propose and extensively evaluate a different Crowdsourcing approach based on a push methodology. Our proposed system carefully selects which workers should perform a given task based on worker profiles extracted from social networks. Workers and tasks are automatically matched using an underlying categorization structure that exploits entities extracted from the task descriptions on one hand, and categories liked by the user on social platforms on the other hand. We experimentally evaluate our approach on tasks of varying complexity and show that our push methodology consistently yield better results than usual pull strategies.