Cascade: Crowdsourcing Taxonomy Creation

Taxonomies are a useful and ubiquitous way of organizing information. However, creating organizational hierarchies is difficult because the process requires a global understanding of the objects to be categorized. Usually one is created by an individual or a small group of people working together for hours or even days. Unfortunately, this centralized approach does not work well for the large, quickly-changing datasets found on the web. Cascade is an automated workflow that creates a taxonomy from the collective efforts of crowd workers who spend as little as 20 seconds each. We evaluate Cascade and show that on three datasets its quality is 80-90% of that of experts. The cost of Cascade is competitive with expert information architects, despite taking six times more human labor. Fortunately, this labor can be parallelized such that Cascade will run in as fast as five minutes instead of hours or days.