Crowdsourcing high quality labels with a tight budget

In the past decade, commercial crowdsourcing platforms have revolutionized the ways of classifying and annotating data, especially for large datasets. Obtaining labels for a single instance can be inexpensive, but for large datasets, it is important to allocate budgets wisely. With limited budgets, requesters must trade-off between the quantity of labeled instances and the quality of the final results. Existing budget allocation methods can achieve good quantity but cannot guarantee high quality of individual instances under a tight budget. However, in some scenarios, requesters may be willing to label fewer instances but of higher quality. Moreover, they may have different requirements on quality for different tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a flexible budget allocation framework called Requallo. Requallo allows requesters to set their specific requirements on the labeling quality and maximizes the number of labeled instances that achieve the quality requirement under a tight budget. The budget allocation problem is modeled as a Markov decision process and a sequential labeling policy is produced. The proposed policy greedily searches for the instance to query next as the one that can provide the maximum reward for the goal. The Requallo framework is further extended to consider worker reliability so that the budget can be better allocated. Experiments on two real-world crowdsourcing tasks as well as a simulated task demonstrate that when the budget is tight, the proposed Requallo framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art budget allocation methods from both quantity and quality aspects.