“We (Brendan O’Connor) recently teamed up with Rion Snow, Prof. Dan Jurafsky, and Prof. Andrew Ng from the Stanford AI Lab to try using Amazon Mechanical Turk to generate data sets for Machine Learning research. Many AI tasks require a large amount of training data, and to build natural language systems, researchers traditionally pay linguistic experts for millions of annotations. Search engine companies employ hundreds or thousands of annotators for their classification, ranking, and other statistically trained systems, but their data is private and is not available for research. AMT is a potential tool to create high quality data sets accessible to everyone.” source...