Answer validation for generic crowdsourcing tasks with minimal efforts

Crowdsourcing has been established as an essential means to scale human computation in diverse Web applications, reaching from data integration to information retrieval. Yet, crowd workers have wide-ranging levels of expertise. Large worker populations are heterogeneous and comprise a significant amount of faulty workers. As a consequence, quality insurance for crowd answers is commonly seen as the Achilles heel of crowdsourcing. Although various techniques for quality control have been proposed in recent years, a post-processing phase in which crowd answers are validated is still required. Such validation, however, is typically conducted by experts, whose availability is limited and whose work incurs comparatively high costs. This work aims at guiding an expert in the validation of crowd answers. We present a probabilistic model that helps to identify the most beneficial validation questions in terms of …