SocialTransfer: Transferring Social Knowledge for Cold-Start Crowdsourcing

An essential component of building a successful crowdsourcing market is effective task matching, which matches a given task to the right crowdworkers. In order to provide highquality task matching, crowdsourcing systems rely on past task-solving activities of crowdworkers. However, the average number of past activities of crowdworkers in most crowdsourcing systems is very small. We call the workers who have only solved a small number of tasks cold-start crowdworkers. We observe that most of the workers in crowdsourcing systems are cold-start crowdworkers, and crowdsourcing systems actually enjoy great benefits from cold-start crowdworkers. However, the problem of task matching with the presence of many cold-start crowdworkers has not been well studied. We propose a new approach to address this issue. Our main idea, motivated by the prevalence of online social networks, is to transfer the knowledge about crowdworkers in their social networks to crowdsourcing systems for task matching. We propose a SocialTransfer model for cold-start crowdsourcing, which not only infers the expertise of warmstart crowdworkers from their past activities, but also transfers the expertise knowledge to cold-start crowdworkers via social connections. We evaluate the SocialTransfer model on the well-known crowdsourcing system Quora, using knowledge from the popular social network Twitter. Experimental results show that, by transferring social knowledge, our method achieves significant improvements over the state-ofthe-art methods.