doi
10.1145/3465336.3475109
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475109
name
What Is Unclear? Computational Assessment of Task Clarity in Crowdsourcing
pages
12
acm_url
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465336.3475109
authors
1.Zahra Nouri
2.Ujwal Gadiraju
3.Gregor Engels
4.Henning Wachsmuth
doi_url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475109
license
restricted
summary
(empty)
abstract
Designing tasks clearly to facilitate accurate task completion is a challenging endeavor for requesters on crowdsourcing platforms. Prior research shows that inexperienced requesters fail to write clear and complete task descriptions which directly leads to low quality submissions from workers. By complementing existing works that have aimed to address this challenge, in this paper we study whether clarity flaws in task descriptions can be identified automatically using natural language processing methods. We identify and synthesize seven clarity flaws in task descriptions that are grounded in relevant literature. We build both BERT-based and feature-based binary classifiers, in order to study the extent to which clarity flaws in task descriptions can be computationally assessed, and understand textual properties of descriptions that affect task clarity. Through a crowdsourced study, we collect annotations of clarity flaws in 1332 real task descriptions. Using this dataset, we evaluate several configurations of the classifiers. Our results indicate that nearly all the clarity flaws in task descriptions can be assessed reasonably by the classifiers. We found that the content, style, and readability of tasks descriptions are particularly important in shaping their clarity. This work has important implications on the design of tools to help requesters in improving task clarity on crowdsourcing platforms. Flaw-specific properties can provide for valuable guidance in improving task descriptions.
keywords
1.Crowdsourcing
2.Task design
3.Unclear task descriptions
4.Task clarity assessment
5.Feature-based binary classification
6.BERT-based binary classification
source_pdf
HT-2021_35-30_3465336/3465336.3475109.pdf
import_kind
full_text
open_access
false
publication
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’21)
ccs_concepts
• Computing methodologies →Natural language processing;
displayAuthor
Zahra Nouri, Ujwal Gadiraju, Gregor Engels, Henning Wachsmuth
source_sha256
52f29506fcc21e0a0b4589877456330c5cfbccda6e631f2e6bdc0fcfb11c4f09
publication_year
2021