Hierarchies of concepts are useful in many applications from navigation to organization of objects. Usually, a hierarchy is created in a centralized manner by employing a group of domain experts, a time-consuming and expensive process. The experts often design one single hierarchy to best explain the semantic relationships among the concepts, and ignore the natural uncertainty that may exist in the process. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing system to build a hierarchy and furthermore capture the underlying uncertainty. Our system maintains a distribution over possible hierarchies and actively selects questions to ask using an information gain criterion. We evaluate our methodology on simulated data and on a set of real world application domains. Experimental results show that our system is robust to noise, efficient in picking questions, cost-effective, and builds high quality hierarchies.
The following video demonstrates how the model parameters, adjacency matrix of the graph, evolves after getting more information from workers.
This video shows the corresponding MAP tree (the most probable tree) after each update.
The same method can be applied to build very large hierarchies.