Title
All Those Wasted Hours - On Task Abandonment in Crowdsourcing.
Abstract
Crowdsourcing has become a standard methodology to collect manually annotated data such as relevance judgments at scale. On crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon MTurk or FigureEight, crowd workers select tasks to work on based on different dimensions such as task reward and requester reputation. Requesters then receive the judgments of workers who self-selected into the tasks and completed them successfully. Several crowd workers, however, preview tasks, begin working on them, reaching varying stages of task completion without finally submitting their work. Such behavior results in unrewarded effort which remains invisible to requesters. In this paper, we conduct the first investigation into the phenomenon of task abandonment, the act of workers previewing or beginning a task and deciding not to complete it. We follow a three-fold methodology which includes 1) investigating the prevalence and causes of task abandonment by means of a survey over different crowdsourcing platforms, 2) data-driven analyses of logs collected during a large-scale relevance judgment experiment, and 3) controlled experiments measuring the effect of different dimensions on abandonment. Our results show that task abandonment is a widely spread phenomenon. Apart from accounting for a considerable amount of wasted human effort, this bears important implications on the hourly wages of workers as they are not rewarded for tasks that they do not complete. We also show how task abandonment may have strong implications on the use of collected data (for example, on the evaluation of IR systems).
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3289600.3291035
WSDM
Keywords
Field
DocType
crowdsourcing, relevance judgments, task abandonment
Data science,Information retrieval,Computer science,Crowdsourcing,Task completion,Reputation
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5940-5
1
0.35
References 
Authors
29
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lei Han193.13
Kevin Roitero23013.74
Ujwal Gadiraju3698.42
Cristina Sarasua492.14
Alessandro Checco57812.85
Eddy Maddalena6183.57
Gianluca Demartini7627.99