A Novel Algorithm for Aggregating Crowdsourced Opinions
Ethan Prihar, Neil Heffernan
Jun 30, 2021 16:35 UTC+2
—
Session B3
—
Zoom link
Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Similarity, Community Detection, Hierarchical Clustering
Abstract:
Similar content has tremendous utility in classroom and online learning environments. For example, similar content can be used to combat cheating, track students' learning over time, and model students' latent knowledge. These different use cases for similar content all rely on different notions of similarity, which make it difficult to determine contents' similarities. Crowdsourcing is an effective way to identify similar content in a variety of situations by providing workers with guidelines on how to identify similar content for a particular use case. However, crowdsourced opinions are rarely homogeneous and therefore must be aggregated into what is most likely the truth. This work presents the Dynamically Weighted Majority Vote (DWMV) method. A novel algorithm that combines aggregating workers' crowdsourced opinions with estimating the reliability of each worker. The DWMV method was compared to the traditional majority vote method in both a simulation study and an empirical study, in which opinions on seventh grade mathematics problems' similarity were crowdsourced from middle school math teachers and college students. In both the simulation and the empirical study the DWMV method outperformed the traditional majority vote method, suggesting that DWMV should be used instead of majority vote in future crowdsourcing endeavors.