Title
What Is Unclear? Computational Assessment of Task Clarity in Crowdsourcing
Abstract
ABSTRACTDesigning 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3465336.3475109
Hypertext and Hypermedia
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Crowdsourcing, Task design, Unclear task descriptions, Task clarity assessment, Feature-based binary classification, BERT-based binary classification
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zahra Nouri100.34
Ujwal Gadiraju2698.42
Gregor Engels32245420.50
Henning Wachsmuth49824.35