Alloy

Clustering with Crowds and Computation

Joseph Chee Chang, Aniket Kittur, Nathan Hahn. ACM SIGCHI 2016 (r=23% N=2435)

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Many crowd clustering approaches have difficulties providing global context to workers in order to generate meaningful categories. Alloy uses a sample-and-search technique to provide a better understanding of the global context. It also combines the in-depth semantic knowledge from human computation and the scalability of machine learning models to create rich structures from unorganized documents with high quality and efficiency.

Abstract

Crowdsourced clustering approaches present a promising way to harness deep semantic knowledge for clustering complex information. However, existing approaches have difficulties supporting the global context needed for workers to generate meaningful categories, and are costly because all items require human judgments. We introduce Alloy, a hybrid approach that combines the richness of human judgments with the power of machine algorithms. Alloy supports greater global context through a new sample and search crowd pattern which changes the crowd’s task from classifying a fixed subset of items to actively sampling and querying the entire dataset. It also improves efficiency through a two phase process in which crowds provide examples to help a machine cluster the head of the distribution, then classify low-confidence examples in the tail. To accomplish this, Alloy introduces a modular cast and gather approach which leverages a machine learning backbone to stitch together different types of judgment tasks.

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Citation

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Joseph Chee Chang, Aniket Kittur, and Nathan Hahn. 2016.
Alloy: Clustering with Crowds and Computation.
In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16).
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3180-3191. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858411

Bibtex

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@inproceedings{Chang:2016:ACC:2858036.2858411,
 author = {Chang, Joseph Chee and Kittur, Aniket and Hahn, Nathan},
 title = {Alloy: Clustering with Crowds and Computation},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
 series = {CHI '16},
 year = {2016},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-3362-7},
 location = {Santa Clara, California, USA},
 pages = {3180--3191},
 numpages = {12},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858411},
 doi = {10.1145/2858036.2858411},
 acmid = {2858411},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
}