Obtaining High-Quality Label by Distinguishing between Easy and Hard Items in Crowdsourcing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crowdsourcing systems make it possible to hire voluntary workers to label large-scale data by offering them small monetary payments. Usually, the taskmaster requires to collect high-quality labels, while the quality of labels obtained from the crowd may not satisfy this requirement. In this paper, we study the problem of obtaining high-quality labels from the crowd and present an approach of learning the difficulty of items in crowdsourcing, in which we construct a small training set of items with estimated difficulty and then learn a model to predict the difficulty of future items. With the predicted difficulty, we can distinguish between easy and hard items to obtain high-quality labels. For easy items, the quality of their labels inferred from the crowd could be high enough to satisfy the requirement; while for hard items, the crowd could not provide high-quality labels, it is better to choose a more knowledgable crowd or employ specialized workers to label them. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach by learning to distinguish between easy and hard items can significantly improve the label quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".