Rationale awareness for quality assurance in iterative human computation processes

TL;DR

This paper explores how awareness of previous workers' rationales influences the effectiveness of iterative human computation processes in tasks like brainstorming and rating, highlighting a new research direction in meta-cognitive support for crowdsourcing.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of rationale awareness in iterative human computation and investigates its impact on task performance, a novel approach in crowdsourcing research.

Findings

Rationale awareness improves task quality in iterative processes.

Iterative approach with rationale sharing enhances collaborative problem solving.

Preliminary evidence supports meta-cognitive support in crowdsourcing.

Abstract

Human computation refers to the outsourcing of computation tasks to human workers. It offers a new direction for solving a variety of problems and calls for innovative ways of managing human computation processes. The majority of human computation tasks take a parallel approach, whereas the potential of an iterative approach, i.e., having workers iteratively build on each other's work, has not been sufficiently explored. This study investigates whether and how human workers' awareness of previous workers' rationales affects the performance of the iterative approach in a brainstorming task and a rating task. Rather than viewing this work as a conclusive piece, the author believes that this research endeavor is just the beginning of a new research focus that examines and supports meta-cognitive processes in crowdsourcing activities.