Managing Mechanical Turk problems

Cory Doctorow 5:08 am Mon Mar 24, 2008

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.

(via Data Mining)

See also: Mechanical Turked color names

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