Human OCR: Insights from a Complex Human Computation Process

Human computation is a growing research field. It holds the promise of humans and computers working seamlessly together to implement powerful systems, but this requires in depth knowledge about the communication barrier between man and machine. In this paper, we discuss the creation of a relatively complicated human computation process. We test our process on a set of real world data, and discuss the results. We also extract general human computation principles from this process, including the general merits of independent agreement, as well as the risks of piecework, where workers see only a subset of a larger task. Author Keywords