CrowdLang: A Programming Language for the Systematic Exploration of Human Computation Systems

Human computation systems are often the result of extensive lengthy trial-and-error refinements. What we lack is an approach to systematically engineer solutions based on past successful patterns.In this paper we present the CrowdLang1 programming framework for engineering complex computation systems incorporating large crowds of networked humans and machines with a library of known interaction patterns. We evaluate CrowdLang by programming a German-to-English translation program incorporating machine translation and a monolingual crowd. The evaluation shows that CrowdLang is able to simply explore a large design space of possible problem-solving programs with the simple variation of the used abstractions. In an experiment involving 1918 different human actors, we show that the resulting translation program significantly outperforms a pure machine translation in terms of adequacy and fluency whilst translating more than 30 pages per hour and approximates the human-translated gold standard to 75%. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-65002 Originally published at: Minder, Patrick; Bernstein, Abraham (2012). CrowdLang: A Programming Language for the Systematic Exploration of Human Computation Systems. In: Fourth International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012), Lausanne, 5 December 2012 7 December 2012. CrowdLang : A Programming Language for the Systematic Exploration of Human Computation Systems Patrick Minder and Abraham Bernstein Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group University of Zurich, Switzerland {lastname}@ifi.uzh.ch Abstract. Human computation systems are often the result of extensive lengthy trial-and-error refinements. What we lack is an approach to systematically engineer solutions based on past successful patterns. In this paper we present the CrowdLang programming framework for engineering complex computation systems incorporating large crowds of networked humans and machines with a library of known interaction patterns. We evaluate CrowdLang by programming a German-to-English translation program incorporating machine translation and a monolingual crowd. The evaluation shows that CrowdLang is able to simply explore a large design space of possible problem-solving programs with the simple variation of the used abstractions. In an experiment involving 1918 different human actors, we show that the resulting translation program significantly outperforms a pure machine translation in terms of adequacy and fluency whilst translating more than 30 pages per hour and approximates the human-translated gold standard to 75%.