Abstract
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the use of crowdsourcing services for the Text Summarization task in the context of the tourist domain. In particular, our aim is to retrieve relevant information about a place or an object pictured in an image in order to provide a short summary which will be of great help for a tourist. For tackling this task, we proposed a broad set of experiments using crowdsourcing services that could be useful as a reference for others who want to rely also on crowdsourcing. From the analysis carried out through our experimental setup and the results obtained, we can conclude that although crowdsourcing services were not good to simply gather gold-standard summaries (i.e., from the results obtained for experiments 1, 2 and 4), the encouraging results obtained in the third and sixth experiments motivate us to strongly believe that they can be successfully employed for finding some patterns of behaviour humans have when generating summaries, and for validating and checking other tasks. Furthermore, this analysis serves as a guideline for the types of experiments that might or might not work when using crowdsourcing in the context of text summarization.
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Crowdflower (http://crowdflower.com/) is a crowdsourcing service built on top of AMT which allows non-US citizens to run tasks on AMT.
Human Intelligence Tasks.
Since AMT has been employed more than Crowdflower, in this section, we mainly focus on this platform.
Text analysis conference: http://www.nist.gov/tac/.
We establish a length of 200 words for all generated summaries.
In the manual process we identified the full sentence where the part occurred and selected the entire sentence as answer.
Our previous experiments have shown that the country of workers’ does not have impact on the quality of the results.
For summaries which did not contain this information we included to the end of it a sentence providing the country information.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the EU-funded TRIPOD project (IST-FP6-045335) and by the Spanish Government through the FPU program and the projects TIN2009-14659-C03-01, TSI 020312-2009-44, and TIN2009-13391-C04-01; and by Conselleria d’Educació–Generalitat Valenciana (grant no. PROMETEO/2009/119 and grant no. ACOMP/2010/286).
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Appendix: HIT for Experiment 5 (Generating Informative Summaries about Tourist Places using Quality Control Mechanisms)
Appendix: HIT for Experiment 5 (Generating Informative Summaries about Tourist Places using Quality Control Mechanisms)
In this appendix, we provide the complete HIT for the experiment regarding the selection of five pieces of information or sentences that best answer different questions a person would like to know about a specific place. Together with the instructions we provide an example of how to perform the task, and we also warned the annotators of the acceptance requirements for the task to be considered correctly done.
Information Selection: Instructions
You will be given a name of a geo-graphical place, a picture of it and 10 documents related to the place. Imagine you are a tourist and have got 5 questions about the place for which you would like to know the answers (i.e., what information you would ask for). Please select your answers from the given documents. The documents contain in each line a sentence. Your answer selections can contain the entire sentence or a part of it.
Finally, you will be given two questions. Please answer them. The answers might not come from the given documents.
Example
Given Place Name: Ararat (Fig. 7)
Your possible questions might look like:
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1.
What is Ararat?
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2.
Where it is located? 3. What is its height? 4. How many peaks does it have? 5. When was the last erruption?
Your possible answer selections might look like:
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1.
Ararat is a stratovolcano, formed of lava flows and pyroclastic ejecta, with no volcanic crater.
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2.
Mount Ararat is located in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey
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3.
It has an elevation of 5,137 m/16,854 ft)
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4.
It has two peaks
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5.
It is not known when the last eruption of Ararat occurred
Acceptance Requirement
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A.
We added trap sentences into the documents. Thus your work should be genuine. In the case a trap sentence is selected as answer, the work will be rejected.
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B.
You should avoid redundant information while selecting the sentences. For instance, if you select two sentences which contain the same information about the place then your work will be rejected.
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C.
You have to go through all documents. Otherwise your work will be rejected.
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Lloret, E., Plaza, L. & Aker, A. Analyzing the capabilities of crowdsourcing services for text summarization. Lang Resources & Evaluation 47, 337–369 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9198-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9198-8