Crowdsourcing the assembly of concept hierarchies

The“wisdom of crowds”is accomplishing tasks that are cumbersome for individuals yet cannot be fully automated by means of specialized computer algorithms. One such task is the construction of thesauri and other types of concept hierarchies. Human expert feedback on the relatedness and relative generality of terms, however, can be aggregated to dynamically construct evolving concept hierarchies. The InPhO (Indiana Philosophy Ontology) project bootstraps feedback from volunteer users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. The approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, we show that results of comparable quality can be achieved by leveraging the workforce of crowdsourcing services such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In an extensive empirical study, we compare the feedback obtained from AMT’s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: JCDL
• Authors: Kai Eckert, Mathias Niepert, Christof Niemann, Cameron Buckner, Colin Allen, Heiner Stuckenschmidt
• Keywords: Concept Hierarchies, Expert Feedback, Feedback, JCDL 2010