Expertise-Aware Truth Analysis and Task Allocation in Mobile Crowdsourcing

Mobile crowdsourcing has received considerable attention as it enables people to collect and share large volume of data through their mobile devices. Since the accuracy of the collected data is usually hard to ensure, researchers have proposed techniques to identify truth from noisy data by inferring and utilizing the reliability of users, and allocate tasks to users with higher reliability. However, they neglect the fact that a user may only have expertise on some problems (in some domains), but not others. Neglecting this expertise diversity may cause two problems: low estimation accuracy in truth analysis and ineffective task allocation. To address these problems, we propose an Expertise-aware Truth Analysis and Task Allocation (ETA2) approach, which can effectively infer user expertise and then allocate tasks and estimate truth based on the inferred expertise. ETA2 relies on a novel semantic analysis method to identify the expertise domains of the tasks and user expertise, an expertise-aware truth analysis solution to estimate truth and learn user expertise, and an expertise-aware task allocation method to maximize the probability that tasks are allocated to users with the right expertise while ensuring the work load does not exceed the processing capability at each user. Experimental results based on two real-world datasets demonstrate that ETA2 significantly outperforms existing solutions.