A Worker-Task Specialization Model for Crowdsourcing: Efficient Inference and Fundamental Limits
Crowdsourcing system has emerged as an effective platform to label data with
relatively low cost by using non-expert workers. However, inferring correct
labels from multiple noisy answers on data has been a challenging problem,
since the quality of answers varies widely across tasks and workers. Many
previous works have assumed a simple model where the order of workers in terms
of their reliabilities is fixed across tasks, and focused on estimating the
worker reliabilities to aggregate answers with different weights. We propose a
highly general $d$-type worker-task specialization model in which the
reliability of each worker can change depending on the type of a given task,
where the number $d$ of types can scale in the number of tasks. In this model,
we characterize the optimal sample complexity to correctly infer labels with
any given recovery accuracy, and propose an inference algorithm achieving the
order-wise optimal bound. We conduct experiments both on synthetic and
real-world datasets, and show that our algorithm outperforms the existing
algorithms developed based on strict model assumptions.