Age-based task specialization for crowdsourced proofreading

Abstract

Crowdsourcing can efficiently produce accessible digital books for people with print disabilities. However, particularly in Japan, the proofreading step tends to be expensive because of language-related issues. The elderly population is a promising source of proofreaders. Our surveys found that they have strong linguistic skills and want to contribute to society. So why do they rarely participate in Internet-based work scenarios such as crowdsourcing? We introduce a collaborative crowdsourcing model that aims to fully utilize the linguistic skills of the elderly by encouraging younger people to support the elderly in overcoming their limited technical skills. We decompose each proofreading task into several types of sub-tasks, where some tasks require more linguistic skills while the other tasks need more technical skills, so that the linguistic and technical tasks can be distributed to older and younger participants, respectively. We also discuss other scenarios that may be suitable for such multi-generational crowdsourcing model. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.