Amazon Mechanical Turk Cheat Sheet
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace where Requesters can post tasks, known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), for Workers to complete in exchange for a reward. It's an effective way to leverage a global workforce for tasks that require human intelligence. You can create, test, and publish your HITs using the Mechanical Turk developer sandbox, the Amazon Mechanical Turk APIs, and various AWS SDKs.
Benefits
- Optimize Efficiency: MTurk is ideal for handling simple, repetitive, and manual tasks within your workflows, freeing up your internal resources for more complex work.
- Increase Flexibility: Gain access to a global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce without the challenges of dynamically scaling your own team.
- Reduce Cost: MTurk operates on a pay-per-task model, which helps in reducing costs associated with hiring and managing a temporary workforce.
Core Concepts
Requester
A Requester is an individual, company, or organization that creates and submits tasks (HITs) to the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform for Workers to perform.
Human Intelligence Task (HIT)
A HIT is a single, self-contained task. Key attributes of a HIT include:
- Lifetime: The duration for which the HIT is available to the pool of Workers, as specified by the Requester.
- Assignment Duration: The amount of time a Worker has to complete the HIT after accepting it.
Worker
A Worker is an individual who performs the tasks specified by a Requester in a HIT.
- A Requester can specify how many Workers can work on a single task.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk ensures that a Worker can only work on a specific task once.
Developer
Developers are responsible for creating the applications that both Requesters and Workers use to interact with the Mechanical Turk service. However, Requesters can also create and manage HITs without developer assistance by using the Mechanical Turk command-line interface (CLI) or the Requester User Interface (RUI).
Assignment
An Assignment specifies the number of people who can submit completed work for a single HIT.
- When a Worker accepts a HIT, MTurk creates an assignment to track the work through to completion.
- This assignment is exclusive to the Worker and guarantees their ability to submit the results and be eligible for the reward until the assignment or HIT expires.
Reward
A reward is the monetary payment a Requester provides to a Worker for the satisfactory completion of a HIT.
Qualification
A Qualification is an attribute that a Requester can assign to a Worker.
- It consists of a name and a numerical value.
- A HIT can have Qualification Requirements, which a Worker must meet to be eligible to accept the HIT.
Qualification Type
A Qualification Type can include a Qualification Test. This is a series of questions, much like a HIT, that a Worker must answer correctly to be granted the associated Qualification.