Toward Blockchain-Assisted Gamified Crowdsourcing for Knowledge Refinement

This paper reports an application of blockchains for knowledge refinement. Constructing a high-quality knowledge base is crucial for building an intelligent system. One promising approach to this task is to make use of “the wisdom of the crowd,” commonly performed through crowdsourcing. To give users proper incentives, gamification could be introduced into crowdsourcing so that users are given rewards according to their contribution. In such a case, it is important to ensure transparency of the rewards system. In this paper, we consider a refinement process of the knowledge base of our word retrieval assistant system. In this knowledge base, each piece of knowledge is represented as a triple. To validate triples acquired from various sources, we introduce yes/no quizzes. Only the triples voted “yes” by a sufficient number of users are incorporated into the main knowledge base. Users are given rewards based on their contribution to this validation process. We describe how a blockchain can be used to ensure transparency of the process, and we present some simulation results of the knowledge refinement process.