Crowdsourcing for information retrieval: principles, methods, and applications

Crowdsourcing has emerged in recent years as a promising new avenue for leveraging today's digitally-connected, diverse, distributed workforce. Generally speaking, crowdsourcing describes outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people instead of assigning such tasks to an in-house employee or contractor. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower have gained particular attention as active online market places for reaching and tapping into this still largely under-utilized workforce. Crowdsourcing also offers intriguing new opportunities for accomplishing different kinds of tasks or achieving broader participation than previously possible, as well as completing standard tasks more accurately in less time and at lower cost. Unlocking the potential of crowdsourcing in practice, however, requires a tri-partite understanding of principles, platforms, and best practices. We will introduce the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing while discussing the three issues above. This will provide a basic foundation to begin crowdsourcing in the context of one's own particular tasks