Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have become popular for a wide variety of human intelligence tasks; however, quality control continues to be a significant challenge. Recently, we propose TURKONTROL, a theoretical model based on POMDPs to optimize iterative, crowd-sourced workflows. However, they neither describe how to learn the model parameters, nor show its effectiveness in a real crowd-sourced setting. Learning is challenging due to the scale of the model and noisy data: there are hundreds of thousands of workers with high-variance abilities. This paper presents an end-to-end system that first learns TURKONTROL's POMDP parameters from real Mechanical Turk data, and then applies the model to dynamically optimize live tasks. We validate the model and use it to control a successive-improvement process on Mechanical Turk. By modeling worker accuracy and voting patterns, our system produces significantly superior artifacts compared to those generated through nonadaptive workflows using the same amount of money.