Group-Oriented Task Allocation for Crowdsourcing in Social Networks

Previous crowdsourcing studies often adopted the individual-oriented approach that outsources a task to an individual worker or team formation-based approach that outsources a task to an artificially formed team of workers. Nowadays, workers are often naturally organized into groups through social networks. To address such common issue of grouped workers in real crowdsourcing systems, this article explores a novel crowdsourcing paradigm in which the task allocation targets are naturally existing worker groups but not individual workers or artificially formed teams as before. Because a natural group might not possess all required skills and needs to coordinate with other groups in the social network contexts for performing a complex task, a concept of contextual crowdsourcing value is presented to measure a group's capacity to complete a task by coordinating with its contextual groups, which determines the priority that the group is assigned the task; then, the task allocation algorithms, including the allocations of groups and the workers actually participating in executing the task, are designed. The experiments on a real-world dataset show that our presented group-oriented approach can nearly always achieve better synergy performance, consistency performance, conflict performance, adaptability, and effectiveness on reducing costs, as compared with previous benchmark individual-oriented and team formation approaches.

Automated summary

This article explores a novel crowdsourcing paradigm where tasks are allocated to naturally existing worker groups. The concept of contextual crowdsourcing value is introduced to measure a group's capacity to complete a task by coordinating with its contextual groups. Experimental results show that this group-oriented approach outperforms previous individual-oriented and team formation approaches in terms of synergy performance, consistency performance, conflict performance, adaptability, and cost reduction effectiveness.