Improving learning-from-crowds through expert validation

Abstract

Although several effective learning-from-crowd methods have been developed to infer correct labels from noisy crowdsourced labels, a method for postprocessed expert validation is still needed. This paper introduces a semi-supervised learning algorithm that is capable of selecting the most informative instances and maximizing the influence of expert labels. Specifically, we have developed a complete uncertainty assessment to facilitate the selection of the most informative instances. The expert labels are then propagated to similar instances via regularized Bayesian inference. Experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets indicate that given a specific accuracy goal (e.g., 95%), our method reduces expert effort from 39% to 60% compared with the state-of-the-art method.