Clustering Without Knowing How To: Application and Evaluation

Abstract: Crowdsourcing allows running simple human intelligence tasks on a large crowd of workers, enabling solving problems for which it is difficult to formulate an algorithm or train a machine learning model in reasonable time. One of such problems is data clustering by an under-specified criterion that is simple for humans, but difficult for machines. In this demonstration paper, we build a crowdsourced system for image clustering and release its code under a free license at https://github.com/Toloka/crowdclustering. Our experiments on two different image datasets, dresses from Zalando's FEIDEGGER and shoes from the Toloka Shoes Dataset, confirm that one can yield meaningful clusters with no machine learning algorithms purely with crowdsourcing.