The present study explores a method to reduce abusive worker behavior on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), namely reminding workers of moral standards. We manipulated workers’ awareness of moral standards via the presence or the absence of an honesty statement in a survey. The results showed that the honesty statement significantly improved workers’ performance during the first half of the survey. This suggests that a moral reminder is a simple and efficient way to reduce abusive worker behavior in a relatively short survey on AMT.

Modern multicore computers provide an opportunity to parallelize plan recognition algorithms to decrease runtime. Viewing plan recognition as parsing based on a complete breadth first search, makes ELEXIR (engine for lexicalized intent recognition) (Geib 2009; Geib and Goldman 2011) particularly suited for parallelization. This article documents the extension of ELEXIR to utilize such modern computing platforms. We will discuss multiple possible algorithms for distributing work between parallel threads and the associated performance wins.

Modern multicore computers provide an opportunity to parallelize plan recognition algorithms to decrease runtime. Viewing plan recognition as parsing based on a complete breadth first search, makes ELEXIR (engine for lexicalized intent recognition) (Geib 2009; Geib and Goldman 2011) particularly suited for parallelization. This article documents the extension of ELEXIR to utilize such modern computing platforms. We will discuss multiple possible algorithms for distributing work between parallel threads and the associated performance wins. We will show, that the best of these algorithms provides close to linear speedup (up to a maximum number of processors), and that features of the problem domain have an impact on the achieved speedup.

We introduce several novel word features for keyword extraction and headline generation. These new word features are derived according to the background knowledge of a document as supplied by Wikipedia. Given a document, to acquire its background knowledge from Wikipedia, we first generate a query for searching the Wikipedia corpus based on the key facts present in the document. We then use the query to find articles in the Wikipedia corpus that are closely related to the contents of the document. With the Wikipedia search result article set, we extract the inlink, outlink, category and infobox information in each article to derive a set of novel word features which reflect the document's background knowledge. These newly introduced word features offer valuable indications on individual words' importance in the input document. They serve as nice complements to the traditional word features derivable from explicit information of a document. In addition, we also introduce a word-document fitness feature to charcterize the influence of a document's genre on the keyword extraction and headline generation process. We study the effectiveness of these novel word features for keyword extraction and headline generation by experiments and have obtained very encouraging results.