Teachable Conversational Agents for Crowdwork: Effects on Performance and Trust

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Traditional crowdsourcing has mostly been viewed as requester-worker interaction where requesters publish tasks to solicit input from human crowdworkers. While most of this research area is catered towards the interest of requesters, we view this workflow as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where one or more human-teachers solve Human Intelligence Tasks to train machine learners. In this work, we explore how teachable machine learners can impact their human-teachers, and whether they form a trustable relation that can be relied upon for task delegation in the context of crowdsourcing. Specifically, we focus our work on teachable agents that learn to classify news articles while also guiding the teaching process through conversational interventions. In a two-part study, where several crowd workers individually teach the agent, we investigate whether this learning by teaching approach benefits human-machine collaboration, and whether it leads to trustworthy AI agents that crowd workers would delegate tasks to. Results demonstrate the benefits of the learning by teaching approach, in terms of perceived usefulness for crowdworkers, and the dynamics of trust built through the teacher-learner interaction.