Applying Human Computation Mechanisms to Information Retrieval

Crowdsourcing and Games with a Purpose (GWAP) have each received considerable attention in recent years. These two human computation mechanisms assist with tasks that cannot be solved by computers alone. Despite this increased attention, much of this transformation has been limited to a few aspects of Information Retrieval (IR). In this paper, we examine these two mechanisms ’ applicability to IR. Using an IR model, we apply criteria to determine the suitability of these crowdsourcing and GWAP mechanisms to each step of the model. Our analysis illustrates that these mechanisms can apply to several of these steps with good returns