We present findings from a collaborative effort aimed at testing the feasibility of using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a data collection platform to build a corpus of document images. Experimental design and implementation workflow are described. Preliminary findings and directions for future work are also discussed.

The language used in online forums differs in many ways from that of traditional language resources such as news. One difference is the use and frequency of nonliteral, subjective dialogue acts such as sarcasm. Whether the aim is to develop a theory of sarcasm in dialogue, or engineer automatic methods for reliably detecting sarcasm, a major challenge is simply the difficulty of getting enough ...

Human listeners can almost instantaneously judge whether or not another speaker is part of their speech community. The basis of this judgment is the speaker’s accent. Even though humans judge speech accents with ease, it has been tremendously difficult to automatically evaluate and rate accents in any consistent manner. This paper describes an experiment using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to deve...

Foraging is a search process common to all mobile organisms. Spatial memory can improve foraging efficiency and efficacy, and evidence indicates that many species—including humans—actively utilize spatial memory to aid in their foraging, yet most current models of foraging do not include spatial memory. In this study, a simple online foraging game was used to attempt to replicate and extend fin...

We conducted surveys before and after the 2012 U.S. Presidential election and prior to the NY City Mayoral election in 2013. The surveys were done using Amazon Turk. This poster describes the results of our analysis of the surveys and predicts the winner of the NY City Mayoral Election.

n online service that connects people all over the world who are willing to work for monetary compensation with companies and individuals who need simple tasks completed that are best done by humans. This paper examines the benefits and caveats from the use of Mechanical Turk as a platform to conduct an online usability test. Our findings indicate that Mechanical Turk can be a very useful tool ...

The present study explores a method to reduce abusive worker behavior on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), namely reminding workers of moral standards. We manipulated workers’ awareness of moral standards via the presence or the absence of an honesty statement in a survey. The results showed that the honesty statement significantly improved workers’ performance during the first half of the survey. ...

in the reign of shāh ismā‘īl i, the position-holder wakīl-i nafs-i nafīs-i humāyūn would serve as the regent (nāyib al-salṭana). after six months that this position was held by one of the elites who was a qizilbash turk, shāh ismā‘īl handed it over to a non-turk and continued the same procedure to the end of his life. the present article is mainly intended to study the social origin of the wakī...