Conversational Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become a standard approach for the collection of the human input required by scientists and practitioners alike to execute their experiments, or to train, control, and verify the behavior of their intelligent systems. Despite years of successful research and industrial application, how to improve the engagement and satisfaction of crowd workers with crowdsourcing tasks is still an open research question. In this thesis, we introduce conversational crowdsourcing – a novel crowdsourcing interaction paradigm based on conversational interfaces. We study conversational crowdsourcing, and experimentally evaluate its ability to foster workers’ engagement and satisfaction from four perspectives: conversational crowdsourcing design, improving worker engagement and satisfaction, analyzing the roles of worker mood and self-identification, and applying conversational crowdsourcing for conducting online studies. We describe the design of conversational crowdsourcing and show that conversational crowdsourcing can achieve similar output quality and execution time compared to the traditional web-based crowdsourcing. To facilitate our research, we designed and developed TickTalkTurk, a web application that facilitates the design and development of conversational crowdsourcing tasks on popular crowdsourcing platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of improving worker engagement and satisfaction and show that conversational crowdsourcing can improve worker retention and perceived engagement that are significantly connected to satisfaction. We present a reliable conversational style estimation method and illustrate that style estimation can be a useful tool for facilitating outcome prediction and task assignment.