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Record W2405546739 · doi:10.1145/2858036.2858490

How One Microtask Affects Another

2016· article· en· W2405546739 on OpenAlex
Edward Newell, Derek Ruths

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceCrowdsCrowdsourcingWorkflowExploitTask (project management)Human–computer interactionData scienceMultimediaCognitive psychologyWorld Wide WebPsychologyComputer security

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Microtask platforms are becoming commonplace tools for performing human research, producing gold-standard data, and annotating large datasets. These platforms connect requesters (researchers or companies) with large populations (crowds) of workers, who perform small tasks, typically taking less than five minutes each. A topic of ongoing research concerns the design of tasks that elicit high quality annotations. Here we identify a seemingly banal feature of nearly all crowdsourcing workflows that profoundly impacts workers' responses. Microtask assignments typically consist of a sequence of tasks sharing a common format (e.g., circle galaxies in an image). Using image-labeling, a canonical microtask format, we show that earlier tasks can have a strong influence on responses to later tasks, shifting the distribution of future responses by 30-50% (total variational distance). Specifically, prior tasks influence the content that workers focus on, as well as the richness and specialization of responses. We call this phenomenon intertask effects. We compare intertask effects to framing, effected by stating the requester's research interest, and find that intertask effects are on par or stronger. If uncontrolled, intertask effects could be a source of systematic bias, but our results suggest that, with appropriate task design, they might be leveraged to hone worker focus and acuity, helping to elicit reproducible, expert-level judgments. Intertask effects are a crucial aspect of human computation that should be considered in the design of any crowdsourced study.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.915
Threshold uncertainty score0.230

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.192
Teacher spread0.179 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations30
Published2016
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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