skip to main content
research-article

Efficient Learning-Based Recommendation Algorithms for Top-N Tasks and Top-N Workers in Large-Scale Crowdsourcing Systems

Published: 30 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The task and worker recommendation problems in crowdsourcing systems have brought up unique characteristics that are not present in traditional recommendation scenarios, i.e., the huge flow of tasks with short lifespans, the importance of workers’ capabilities, and the quality of the completed tasks. These unique features make traditional recommendation approaches no longer satisfactory for task and worker recommendation in crowdsourcing systems. In this article, we propose a two-tier data representation scheme (defining a worker--category suitability score and a worker--task attractiveness score) to support personalized task and worker recommendations. We also extend two optimization methods, namely least mean square error and Bayesian personalized rank, to better fit the characteristics of task/worker recommendation in crowdsourcing systems. We then integrate the proposed representation scheme and the extended optimization methods along with the two adapted popular learning models, i.e., matrix factorization and kNN, and result in two lines of top-N recommendation algorithms for crowdsourcing systems: (1) Top-N-Tasks recommendation algorithms for discovering the top-N most suitable tasks for a given worker and (2) Top-N-Workers recommendation algorithms for identifying the top-N best workers for a task requester. An extensive experimental study is conducted that validates the effectiveness and efficiency of a broad spectrum of algorithms, accompanied by our analysis and the insights gained.

References

[1]
Gediminas Adomavicius and Alexander Tuzhilin. 2005. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: A survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 17, 6 (2005), 734--749.
[2]
Charu C. Aggarwal. 2016. Recommender Systems: The Textbook. Springer.
[3]
V. Ambati, S. Vogel, and J. Carbonell. 2011. Towards task recommendation in micro-task markets. In Proceedings of the 25th AAAI Workshop in Human Computation. AAAI.
[4]
Léon Bottou. 2004. Stochastic learning. In Advanced Lectures on Machine Learning, Olivier Bousquet and Ulrike von Luxburg (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 146--168.
[5]
Léon Bottou. 2010. Large-scale machine learning with stochastic gradient descent. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Statistics (COMPSTAT’10). Physica-Verlag HD, 177--186.
[6]
Ioannis Boutsis and Vana Kalogeraki. 2014. On task assignment for real-time reliable crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 34th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’14). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1--10.
[7]
Daren C. Brabham. 2010. Moving the crowd at threadless. Inf. Commun. Soc. 13, 8 (2010), 1122--1145.
[8]
Chris Buckley, Matthew Lease, and Mark D Smucker. 2010. Overview of the TREC 2010 relevance feedback track (Notebook). In Proceedings of the 19th Text Retrieval Conference.
[9]
Robin Burke and Maryam Ramezani. 2011. Matching Recommendation Technologies and Domains. Springer US, Boston, MA, 367--386.
[10]
C. Castro-Herrera. 2010. A hybrid recommender system for finding relevant users in open source forums. In Proceedings of the 2010 3rd International Workshop on Managing Requirements Knowledge (MARK’10). 41--50.
[11]
Ghislaine Chartron and Grald Kembellec. 2014. General Introduction to Recommender Systems. Wiley-Blackwell, Chapter 1, 1--23.
[12]
D. Che, M. Safran, and Z. Peng. 2013. From big data to big data mining: Challenges, issues, and opportunities. In Database Systems for Advanced Applications, Chapter 1, Vol. 7827. Springer, Berlin, 1--15.
[13]
L. Chilton, J. Horton, R. Miller, and S. Azenkot. 2010. Task search in a human computation market. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation. ACM, New York, NY, 1--9.
[14]
Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. 2006. Using intelligent task routing and contribution review to help communities build artifacts of lasting value. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’06). ACM, New York, NY, 1037--1046.
[15]
Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. 2007. SuggestBot: Using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’07). ACM, New York, NY, 32--41.
[16]
Paolo Cremonesi, Yehuda Koren, and Roberto Turrin. 2010. Performance of recommender algorithms on Top-n recommendation tasks. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys’10). ACM, New York, NY, 39--46.
[17]
M. Deshpande and G. Karypis. 2004. Item-based Top-N recommendation algorithms. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 22, 1 (2004), 143--177.
[18]
Christian Desrosiers and George Karypis. 2011. A Comprehensive Survey of Neighborhood-based Recommendation Methods. Springer US, Boston, MA, 107--144.
[19]
Djellel Eddine Difallah, Gianluca Demartini, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. 2013. Pick-a-crowd: Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what to do. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW ’13). ACM, New York, NY, 367--374.
[20]
Gideon Dror, Yehuda Koren, Yoelle Maarek, and Idan Szpektor. 2011. I want to answer; who has a question?: Yahoo! answers recommender system. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’11). ACM, New York, NY, 1109--1117.
[21]
Asmaa Elbadrawy and George Karypis. 2015. User-specific feature-based similarity models for Top-n recommendation of new items. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. 6, 3, Article 33 (Apr. 2015), 20 pages.
[22]
Zeno Gantner, Lucas Drumond, Christoph Freudenthaler, Steffen Rendle, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2010. Learning attribute-to-feature mappings for cold-start recommendations. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM’10). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 176--185.
[23]
David Geiger. 2015. Personalized Task Recommendation in Crowdsourcing Systems (1st ed.). Springer, Berlin.
[24]
David Geiger and Martin Schader. 2014. Personalized task recommendation in crowdsourcing information systems - Current state of the art. Dec. Support Syst. 65 (2014), 3--16. Crowdsourcing and Social Networks Analysis
[25]
Catherine Grady and Matthew Lease. 2010. Crowdsourcing document relevance assessment with mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (CSLDAMT’10). Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, 172--179. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1866696.1866723
[26]
Jinwen Guo, Shengliang Xu, Shenghua Bao, and Yong Yu. 2008. Tapping on the potential of a Q8A community by recommending answer providers. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’08). ACM, New York, NY, 921--930.
[27]
Ruining He and Julian McAuley. 2016. VBPR: Visual Bayesian personalized ranking from implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’16). AAAI Press, 144--150. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3015812.3015834
[28]
Chien-Ju Ho and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan. 2012. Online task assignment in crowdsourcing markets. In Proceedings of the 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’12). AAAI Press, 45--51. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2900728.2900735
[29]
Damon Horowitz and Sepandar D. Kamvar. 2010. The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’10). ACM, New York, NY, 431--440.
[30]
Dawei Hu, Shenhua Gu, Shitong Wang, Liu Wenyin, and Enhong Chen. 2008. Question recommendation for user-interactive question answering systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (ICUIMC’08). ACM, New York, NY, 39--44.
[31]
Yifan Hu, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. 2008. Collaborative filtering for implicit feedback datasets. In Proceedings of the 2008 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM’08). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 263--272.
[32]
P. Ipeirotis. 2010. Analyzing the Amazon mechanical turk marketplace. ACM XRDS 17, 2 (2010), 16--21.
[33]
H. Jamjoom, H. Qu, M. J. Buco, M. Hernandez, D. Saha, and M. Naghshineh. 2009. Crowdsourcing and service delivery. IBM J. Res. Dev. 53, 6 (2009), 12:1--12:10.
[34]
Hyun Joon Jung. 2014. Quality assurance in crowdsourcing via matrix factorization based task routing. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’14 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, 3--8.
[35]
Wei-Chen Kao, Duen-Ren Liu, and Shiu-Wen Wang. 2010. Expert finding in question answering websites: A novel hybrid approach. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC’10). ACM, New York, NY, 867--871.
[36]
G. Karypis. 2001. Evaluation of item-based Top-N recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 247--254.
[37]
Nicolas Kaufmann, Thimo Schulze, and Daniel Veit. 2011. More than fun and money. Worker motivation in crowdsourcing—A study on mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS’11).
[38]
Y. Koren, R. Bell, and C. Volinsky. 2009. Matrix factorization techniques for recommender systems. Computer 42, 8 (2009), 30--37.
[39]
Baichuan Li and Irwin King. 2010. Routing questions to appropriate answerers in community question answering services. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’10). ACM, New York, NY, 1585--1588.
[40]
Baichuan Li, Irwin King, and Michael R. Lyu. 2011. Question routing in community question answering: Putting category in its place. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’11). ACM, New York, NY, 2041--2044.
[41]
Christopher Lin, Ece Kamar, and Eric Horvitz. 2014. Signals in the silence: Models of implicit feedback in a recommendation system for crowdsourcing. Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI14/paper/view/8425.
[42]
Gang Liu and Tianyong Hao. 2012. User-based question recommendation for question answering system. Int. J. Inf. Educ. Technol. 2, 3 (2012), 243.
[43]
Pasquale Lops, Marco de Gemmis, and Giovanni Semeraro. 2011. Content-based Recommender Systems: State of the Art and Trends. Springer US, Boston, MA, 73--105.
[44]
K. Mao, Y. Yang, Q. Wang, Y. Jia, and M. Harman. 2015. Developer recommendation for crowdsourced software development tasks. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering. 347--356.
[45]
Xia Ning, Christian Desrosiers, and George Karypis. 2015. A Comprehensive Survey of Neighborhood Based Recommendation Methods. Springer US, Boston, MA, 37--76.
[46]
R. Pan, Y. Zhou, B. Cao, N. N. Liu, R. Lukose, M. Scholz, and Q. Yang. 2008. One-class collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 2008 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 502--511.
[47]
Michael J. Pazzani and Daniel Billsus. 2007. Content-based recommendation systems. In The Adaptive Web: Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4321. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 325--341.
[48]
Mingcheng Qu, Guang Qiu, Xiaofei He, Cheng Zhang, Hao Wu, Jiajun Bu, and Chun Chen. 2009. Probabilistic question recommendation for question answering communities. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’09). ACM, New York, NY, 1229--1230.
[49]
Habibur Rahman, Lucas Joppa, and Senjuti Basu Roy. 2016. Feature based task recommendation in crowdsourcing with implicit observations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.03291 (2016).
[50]
Steffen Rendle and Christoph Freudenthaler. 2014. Improving pairwise learning for item recommendation from implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’14). ACM, New York, NY, 273--282.
[51]
Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, Zeno Gantner, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2009. BPR: Bayesian personalized ranking from implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI’09). AUAI Press, Arlington, VA, 452--461. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1795114.1795167
[52]
Mejdl Safran and Dunren Che. 2017. Real-time recommendation algorithms for crowdsourcing systems. Appl. Comput. Inf. 13, 1 (2017), 47--56.
[53]
B. Sarwar, G. Karypis, J. Konstan, and J. Reidl. 2001. Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on World Wide Web. Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 285--295.
[54]
Benjamin Satzger, Harald Psaier, Daniel Schall, and Schahram Dustdar. 2011. Stimulating Skill Evolution in Market-Based Crowdsourcing. Springer, Berlin, 66--82.
[55]
Steffen Schnitzer, Svenja Neitzel, Sebastian Schmidt, and Christoph Rensing. 2016. Perceived task similarities for task recommendation in crowdsourcing systems. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 585--590.
[56]
Thimo Schulze, Simone Krug, and Martin Schader. 2012. Workersfi task choice in crowdsourcing and human computation markets. In International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS’12).
[57]
Thimo Schulze, Stefan Seedorf, David Geiger, Nicolas Kaufmann, and Martin Schader. 2011. Exploring task properties in crowdsourcing—An empirical study on mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS’11).
[58]
Milan Stankovic, Jelena Jovanovic, and Philippe Laublet. 2011. Linked Data Metrics for Flexible Expert Search on the Open Web. Springer, Berlin,108--123.
[59]
Harald Steck. 2010. Training and testing of recommender systems on data missing not at random. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’10). ACM, New York, NY, 713--722.
[60]
Xiaoyuan Su and Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar. 2009. A survey of collaborative filtering techniques. Adv. Artif. Intell. Article 4 (2009), 1 page.
[61]
TurkOpticon. Retrieved Novemeber 26, 2017 from https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/.
[62]
Zhenlei Yan and Jie Zhou. 2012. A new approach to answerer recommendation in community question answering services. In Proceedings of the 34th European Conference on Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR’12). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 121--132.
[63]
Xiwang Yang, Harald Steck, Yang Guo, and Yong Liu. 2012. On Top-k recommendation using social networks. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys’12). ACM, New York, NY, 67--74.
[64]
Y. Connie Yuan, Dan Cosley, Howards T. Welser, Ling Xia, and Geri Gay. 2009. The diffusion of a task recommendation system to facilitate contributions to an online community. J. Comput.-Med. Commun. 15, 1 (2009), 32--59.
[65]
M. C. Yuen, I. King, and K. S. Leung. 2011. Task matching in crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing. IEEE Computer Society, 409--412.
[66]
M. C. Yuen, I. King, and K. S. Leung. 2012. Task recommendation in crowdsourcing systems. In Proceedings of the ACM KDD Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery with Crowdsourcing.
[67]
Man-Ching Yuen, Irwin King, and Kwong-Sak Leung. 2015. Taskrec: A task recommendation framework in crowdsourcing systems. Neur. Process. Lett. 41, 2 (2015), 223--238.
[68]
Man-Ching Yuen, Irwin King, and Kwong-Sak Leung. 2016. An online-updating algorithm on probabilistic matrix factorization with active learning for task recommendation in crowdsourcing systems. Big Data Anal. 1, 1 (2016), 14.
[69]
Haichao Zheng, Dahui Li, and Wenhua Hou. 2011. Task design, motivation, and participation in crowdsourcing contests. Int. J. Electron. Commerce 15, 4 (Jul. 2011), 57--88.
[70]
Yanhong Zhou, Gao Cong, Bin Cui, Christian S. Jensen, and Junjie Yao. 2009. Routing questions to the right users in online communities. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE’09). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 700--711.
[71]
Hengshu Zhu, Enhong Chen, and Huanhuan Cao. 2011. Finding Experts in Tag Based Knowledge Sharing Communities. Springer, Berlin, 183--195.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Privacy Preserving Task Push in Spatial Crowdsourcing With Unknown PopularityIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.343497835:11(2039-2053)Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2024)Group Task Recommendation in Mobile Crowdsensing: An Attention-Based Neural Collaborative ApproachIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.334586523:8(8066-8076)Online publication date: Aug-2024
  • (2024)Optimization of Commodity Recommendation Algorithm Based on Association Rule Mining in E-Commerce2024 International Conference on Telecommunications and Power Electronics (TELEPE)10.1109/TELEPE64216.2024.00144(771-775)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 37, Issue 1
January 2019
435 pages
ISSN:1046-8188
EISSN:1558-2868
DOI:10.1145/3289475
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 October 2018
Accepted: 01 June 2018
Revised: 01 April 2018
Received: 01 August 2017
Published in TOIS Volume 37, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Crowd computing
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. machine learning
  4. ranking algorithms
  5. task recommendation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)19
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Privacy Preserving Task Push in Spatial Crowdsourcing With Unknown PopularityIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.343497835:11(2039-2053)Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2024)Group Task Recommendation in Mobile Crowdsensing: An Attention-Based Neural Collaborative ApproachIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.334586523:8(8066-8076)Online publication date: Aug-2024
  • (2024)Optimization of Commodity Recommendation Algorithm Based on Association Rule Mining in E-Commerce2024 International Conference on Telecommunications and Power Electronics (TELEPE)10.1109/TELEPE64216.2024.00144(771-775)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
  • (2023)A Novel Crowdsourcing Task Recommendation Method Considering Workers’ Fuzzy Expectations: A Case of ZBJ.COMInternational Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making10.1142/S021962202350009823:01(413-446)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Crowd-enabled multiple Pareto-optimal queries for multi-criteria decision-making servicesFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2023.06.007148(342-356)Online publication date: Nov-2023
  • (2023)Swarm Intelligence Research: From Bio-inspired Single-population Swarm Intelligence to Human-machine Hybrid Swarm IntelligenceMachine Intelligence Research10.1007/s11633-022-1367-720:1(121-144)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Deep learning-based recommendation method for top-K tasks in software crowdsourcing systemsJournal of Industrial and Management Optimization10.3934/jimo.2022223(0-0)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)A Task Recommendation Model in Mobile CrowdsourcingWireless Communications & Mobile Computing10.1155/2022/91916052022Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Addressing Popularity Bias in Citizen ScienceProceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good10.1145/3524458.3547229(17-23)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Context- and Fairness-Aware In-Process Crowdworker RecommendationACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348757131:3(1-31)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media