Human-powered sorts and joins
Name
Karger_Human-powered sorts.pdf
Size
1.7 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
9ed8cec87100ed16b7270a62a52172d8
Author(s)
Marcus, Adam
Wu, Eugene
Madden, Samuel R.
Miller, Robert C.
Date Issued
September 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Publisher
VLDB Endowment
Citation
Adam Marcus, Eugene Wu, David Karger, Samuel Madden, and Robert Miller. 2011. Human-powered sorts and joins. Proc. VLDB Endow. 5, 1 (September 2011), 13-24.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Crowdsourcing markets like Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) make it possible to task people with small jobs, such as labeling images or looking up phone numbers, via a programmatic interface. MTurk tasks for processing datasets with humans are currently designed with significant reimplementation of common workflows and ad-hoc selection of parameters such as price to pay per task. We describe how we have integrated crowds into a declarative workflow engine called Qurk to reduce the burden on workflow designers. In this paper, we focus on how to use humans to compare items for sorting and joining data, two of the most common operations in DBMSs. We describe our basic query interface and the user interface of the tasks we post to MTurk. We also propose a number of optimizations, including task batching, replacing pairwise comparisons with numerical ratings, and pre-filtering tables before joining them, which dramatically reduce the overall cost of running sorts and joins on the crowd. In an experiment joining two sets of images, we reduce the overall cost from $67 in a naive implementation to about $3, without substantially affecting accuracy or latency. In an end-to-end experiment, we reduced cost by a factor of 14.5.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol5.html
