Managing Mechanical Turk problems

By at 5:08 am Monday, Mar 24

Dolores Labs is a startup that helps companies solve their problems using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a piecework service that allows millions of casual laborers to contribute to "distributable judgment problems" -- like analyzing a large set of photos to find the faces in them, or classifying documents. The brief list of projects they've conducted to date is a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of problems that are tractable with "mechanical turks."
Document Classification: We helped Scribd, an online publisher, classify documents.

Sentiment: We labeled sentiment (buy/hold/sell) for stocks from posts on message boards.

Price Extraction: We extracted prices from popular shopping sites, as well as an open question to find the lowest price on a given product.

Search Relevance: We judged the relevance of a webpage for a search query.

Link (via Data Mining)

See also: Mechanical Turked color names

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Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy
Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)

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