Task assignment for social-oriented crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become an efficient measure to solve machine-hard problems by embracing group wisdom, in which tasks are disseminated and assigned to a group of workers in the way of open competition. The social relationships formed during this process may in turn contribute to the completion of future tasks. In this sense, it is necessary to take social factors into consideration in the research of crowdsourcing. However, there is little work on the interactions between social relationships and crowdsourcing currently. In this paper, we propose to study such interactions in those social-oriented crowdsourcing systems from the perspective of task assignment. A prototype system is built to help users publish, assign, accept, and accomplish location-based crowdsourcing tasks as well as promoting the development and utilization of social relationships during the crowdsourcing. Especially, in order to exploit the potential relationships between crowdsourcing workers and tasks, we propose a worker-task accuracy estimation algorithm based on a graph model that joints the factorized matrixes of both the user social networks and the history worker-task matrix. With the worker-task accuracy estimation matrix, a group of optimal worker candidates is efficiently chosen for a task, and a greedy task assignment algorithm is proposed to further the matching of worker-task pairs among multiple crowdsourcing tasks so as to maximize the overall accuracy. Compared with the similarity based task assignment algorithm, experimental results show that the average recommendation success rate increased by 3.67%; the average task completion rate increased by 6.17%; the number of new friends added per week increased from 7.4 to 10.5; and the average task acceptance time decreased by 8.5 seconds.

Automated summary

In this paper, the interactions between social relationships and crowdsourcing in social-oriented systems are proposed and studied, with a prototype system built for this purpose. By using a worker-task accuracy estimation algorithm based on a graph model, optimal worker candidates are efficiently chosen for tasks, leading to improved task completion and recommendation success rates. Additionally, a greedy task assignment algorithm is proposed to maximize overall accuracy by further matching worker-task pairs among multiple crowdsourcing tasks.