In regard to earlier postings re crowd-sourcing corpus-related jobs
(pos-tagging, segmentation), here's an link to an interesting talk
by Luis Von Ahn, assistant CS prof at CMU, on "human computation."
After introductory remarks on captchas, he argues for (and
demonstrates) setting up games in which winning requires solving
human-judgment problems. The clever aspect is the way he
establishes built-in mechanisms for ensuring quality; in particular,
devising games in which two independent players must separately
propose the same solution without shared knowledge of what the
other is doing.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
His abstract follows.
Doug Cooper
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ABSTRACT Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to
challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces
a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that
computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems
focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively
channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game,
described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over
40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web
with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve
the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to
help, but because they enjoy it.
I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps
determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects
common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing
games with a purpose.
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