Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Crowdsourcing and Cloud Labor

Technology isn’t the only thing contained in the cloud.  There are people floating around in there too. 

One of the challenges with natural learning, neural networks and text analysis is the ability to categorize an opinion context.  Using a lexicon of various terms, and the syntax of the terms in a statement, you can do a general categorization.  However, what’s to say that “you’re so dumb” and “you’re SO dumb” mean the same thing.  The one with capitals could be a sarcastic comment, depending on the context.

We can do some general analysis of text terms, however manually tagging these may prove to be more accurate.  How do you setup a manual tagging job using real labor?

CrowdFlower’s system leverages large groups of workers to solve massive but technically simple tasks. One of these services is sentiment analysis, the study of public opinion on a given subject. Other sentiment analysis programs use computational linguistics to perform this task, but computers cannot always discern nuances of tone, such as sarcasm or irony. CrowdFlower’s version is unique in that actual humans perform the sentiment analysis.

What Motivates Crowdsource Workers on CrowdFlower & Kaggle – Highlights of SXSW 2012′s “Pay or Play” Crowdsourcing Talk | The CrowdFlower Blog

Sounds interesting!