ExternalQuestion

Description

Instead of providing a QuestionForm data structure that tells Amazon Mechanical Turk how to display your questions and collect answers, you can host the questions on your own website using an "external" question.

A HIT with an external question displays a web page from your website in a frame in the Worker's web browser. Your web page displays a form for the Worker to fill out and submit. The Worker submits results using your form, and your form submits the results back to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using your website to display the form gives your website control over how the question appears and how answers are collected.

To use an external question with a HIT, you provide an ExternalQuestion data structure as the value of the Question parameter when calling the CreateHIT operation. As with the QuestionForm data structure, an ExternalQuestion is a string value that consists of XML data. This data must conform to the ExternalQuestion schema. See Data Structure Schema Locations for the location of this schema. For more information about using XML data as a parameter or return value, see Using XML Parameter Values.

The ExternalQuestion Data Structure

The ExternalQuestion data structure has a root element of ExternalQuestion.

The ExternalQuestion element contains the following elements:

Example

The following is an example of a complete ExternalQuestion data structure. Remember that to pass this structure in as the value of a parameter to an operation, XML characters must be escaped as character entities. For more information about escaping XML characters, see Using XML Parameter Values. See Data Structure Schema Locations for the location of this schema.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ExternalQuestion xmlns="[the ExternalQuestion schema URL]">
  <ExternalURL>https://tictactoe.amazon.com/gamesurvey.cgi?gameid=01523</ExternalURL>
  <FrameHeight>0</FrameHeight>
</ExternalQuestion>

The External Form

When a Worker attempts to complete a HIT with an external question, the external website is loaded into a frame in the middle of the screen. The web page at that URL should display a form for the Worker to fill out, and all the information the Worker will need to complete the HIT.

The Frame's URL and Parameters

The URL used for the frame is the ExternalURL of the question with the following parameters appended: assignmentId, hitId, turkSubmitTo, and workerId. These parameters are appended CGI-style: The full URL has a question mark (?) before the first parameter, and an ampersand (&) between each parameter, with each parameter consisting of a name, an equal sign (=), and a value. Other parameters already present in this style in ExternalURL are preserved, so the final URL will only have one question mark, and all parameters will be separated by ampersands (&).

For example, consider an ExternalURL of:

https://tictactoe.amazon.com/gamesurvey.cgi?gameid=01523

With this ExternalURL, the full URL used for the page in the frame could be as follows:

https://tictactoe.amazon.com/gamesurvey.cgi?gameid=01523
&assignmentId=123RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE456RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE
&hitId=123RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE
&turkSubmitTo=https://www.mturk.com/
&workerId=AZ3456EXAMPLE

Preview Mode

Your external question will be displayed when a Worker previews the HIT on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website, before the Worker has clicked the "Accept HIT" button. When the HIT is being previewed, the URL will have a special value for the assignmentId: ASSIGNMENT_ID_NOT_AVAILABLE.

When a Worker previews a HIT, your web page should show her everything she will need to do to complete the HIT, so she can decide whether or not to accept it. The easiest way to do this is to simply display the form as it would appear when the HIT is accepted. However, you may want to take precautions to prevent a Worker from accidentally filling out or submitting your form prior to accepting the HIT.

You can use JavaScript or server-side logic to check the assignmentId parameter, and change the display of the form if the HIT is being previewed (assignmentId=ASSIGNMENT_ID_NOT_AVAILABLE).

If a Worker submits your form before accepting the HIT, and your form attempts to post the data back to Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Mechanical Turk will display an error message to the Worker, and the results will not be accepted.

The Form Action

The form on the external website must post the result data back to Amazon Mechanical Turk using the following URL:

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit

Or, if you are using the Amazon Mechanical Turk sandbox, you should post the result data back to Mechanical Turk using the following sandbox URL:

https://workersandbox.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit

The form must include the assignmentId field that was appended to the URL used to access your form. It should be submitted along with the other form fields submitted by your form, with a name of assignmentId and the same value as was passed to the form. Be sure to spell the field name as it appears here, with the same letters uppercase and lowercase.

The form must submit data to that URL using the "POST" method. The data the form submits should be name-value pairs in the CGI-style:

The easiest way to post the data in the CGI-style is to use an HTML form on the web page, with the externalSubmit URL as the "action," and "POST" as the "method."

Using Crowd HTML Elements

The External Question supports Crowd HTML Elements. Based on HTML web components, they encapsulate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript functionality behind a single HTML element. For example, the <crowd-form> element sets up your form for you, setting the correct submission endpoint and inserting a submit button at the end. Other elements provide question widgets or design elements you can customize to create more tailored HIT structures.

Requirements

There are three requirements for using Crowd HTML elements:

Try this sample sentiment analysis form.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
	<script src="https://assets.crowd.aws/crowd-html-elements.js"></script>
	<crowd-form>
	  <crowd-classifier
	    name="sentiment"
	    categories="['Positive', 'Negative', 'Neutral', 'N/A']"
	    header="What sentiment does this text convey?"
	  >
	    <classification-target>
	    Everything is wonderful.
	    </classification-target>
	    
	    <full-instructions header="Sentiment Analysis Instructions">
	    <p><strong>Positive</strong> 
	      sentiment include: joy, excitement, delight</p>
	    <p><strong>Negative</strong> sentiment include: 
	      anger, sarcasm, anxiety</p>
	    <p><strong>Neutral</strong>: neither positive or 
	      negative, such as stating a fact</p>
	    <p><strong>N/A</strong>: when the text cannot be 
	      understood</p>
	    <p>When the sentiment is mixed, such as both joy and sadness,
	      use your judgment to choose the stronger emotion.</p>
	    </full-instructions>
	 
	    <short-instructions>
	     Choose the primary sentiment that is expressed by the text. 
	    </short-instructions>
	  </crowd-classifier>
	</crowd-form>
  </body>
</html>

Between the <classification-target> opening and closing tags, you can put any HTML that could be rendered and classified. For example you could use an audio clip or a video clip.

For more details, read the Crowd HTML Elements article or view the Element Reference to see the different elements that are available.

The Answer Data

When the Worker submits your form, the form sends the field data to Amazon Mechanical Turk using the externalSubmit URL, and Amazon Mechanical Turk records the field data as the results of the Assignment.

When you retrieve the results using ListAssignmentsForHIT, the field data submitted by your form will appear in the Answer of the Assignment as if each field were a free-text answer. The QuestionIdentifier element of the answer will be the name of the field, and the FreeText element will contain the value.

See the QuestionFormAnswers data format for more information about the format of answer data.

Guidelines For Using External Questions

External questions give your application a great deal of power over how Workers submit results for your HITs. To ensure you get good results for your HITs, you should make sure your web server and web pages can provide your Workers with a quality experience.

Because external questions depend on your web server for rendering the question form, both while Workers are previewing HITs and while Workers are completing HITs, your server will need to be engineered for high availability. The Amazon Mechanical Turk website gets heavy traffic, so your web server will need to be able to respond quickly and correctly when receiving many requests in a short period of time.

s3_client.put_object(
   ACL='public-read',
   Body=HTML layout,
   Bucket=S3 bucket name,
   Key=Object name,
   ContentType="text/html"
)

Your website can do many things inside the frame, but eventually it must cause the Worker's browser to load the "externalSubmit" URL in the frame with the results in POST data. The easiest way to do this is with an HTML form whose fields contain the HIT results, with a submit button that the Worker will click. If an external HIT prevents the Worker from submitting results back to Amazon Mechanical Turk using the "externalSubmit" mechanism, the Worker may not be able to claim rewards or continue doing work without restarting their session. Amazon Mechanical Turk reserves the right to remove any external HITs that are not functioning properly.

Finally, please remember that external questions must meet the Amazon Mechanical Turk Participation Agreement, and Amazon Mechanical Turk's standards for appropriate content. Specifically, the Participation Agreement expressly prohibits the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk for advertising or solicitation. If your website typically displays advertising to visitors, please make sure those advertisements do not appear in your external questions. Amazon Mechanical Turk reserves the right to remove HITs with inappropriate content.