Crowdsourcing knowledge, one billion facts at a time
Oct 6, 2014 2304 views 
According to the Knowledge Principle formulated by Lenat and Feigenbaum (1991), computer programs need to know a great deal about the world in order to perform well in complex tasks. However, building world-scale knowledge bases cannot yet be fully automated, and is still critically dependent on humans for knowledge collection and curation. In this talk, we will describe our work on using crowdsourcing to make Google's Knowledge Graph (and its extension, Knowledge Vault) more comprehensive and accurate. In particular, we will discuss Quizz, a new gamified crowdsourcing system that simultaneously assesses the knowledge of users and acquires new knowledge from them. Quizz actively tries to identify knowledgeable users on the Internet by running advertising campaigns, effectively leveraging ‘‘for free’’ the targeting capabilities of existing, publicly available, ad placement services. We demonstrate that the cost of our approach is below that of hiring workers through paid-crowdsourcing platforms, while offering the additional advantage of giving access to billions of potential users all over the planet, and being able to reach users with specialized expertise that is not typically available through existing labor marketplaces. Bio: Dr. Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a senior staff research scientist at Google, where he works on knowledge discovery from the web. Prior to joining Google in 2012, he was a director of research and head of the natural language processing and information retrieval group at Yahoo! Research. Evgeniy is an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2012), and is a recipient of the 2010 Karen Sparck Jones Award for his contributions to natural language processing and information retrieval. He served as an area chair or senior program committee member at numerous major conferences, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP, CIKM, ICDM and ICWSM. He has organized a number of workshops and taught multiple tutorials at SIGIR, ACL, WWW, WSDM, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM and EC. Evgeniy earned his PhD in computer science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.