CreateHIT - Amazon Mechanical Turk
DescriptionRequest SyntaxRequest ParametersResponse ElementsExample

CreateHIT

Description

The CreateHIT operation creates a new HIT (Human Intelligence Task). The new HIT is made available for Workers to find and accept on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website.

This operation allows you to specify a new HIT by passing in values for the properties of the HIT, such as its title, reward amount and number of assignments. When you pass these values to CreateHIT, a new HIT is created for you, with a new HITTypeID.

CreateHIT also supports several ways to provide question data: by providing a value for the Question parameter that fully specifies the contents of the HIT, or by providing a HitLayoutId and associated HitLayoutParameters.

For a step-by-step tutorial, please read our blog post which walks you through the HIT creation process.

Note

  • If a HIT is created with 10 or more maximum assignments, there is an additional fee. For more information, see Amazon Mechanical Turk Pricing.

  • During the first few seconds after calling CreateHIT, the HIT cannot be modified except to expire it using UpdateExpirationForHIT. Until the HIT becomes modifiable, the following operations may return a RequestError:

    UpdateHITTypeOfHIT, CreateAdditionalAssignmentsForHIT, and UpdateExpirationForHIT with a DateTime in the future.

Request Syntax

{ 
  "Title": String,

  "Description": String,

  "Question": String,

  "HITLayoutId": String,

  "HITLayoutParameters": HITLayoutParameterList,

  "Reward": String,

  "AssignmentDurationInSeconds": Integer,

  "LifetimeInSeconds": Integer,

  "Keywords": String,

  "MaxAssignments": Integer,

  "AutoApprovalDelayInSeconds": Integer,

  "QualificationRequirements": QualificationRequirementList,

  "AssignmentReviewPolicy": ReviewPolicy,

  "HITReviewPolicy": ReviewPolicy,

  "RequesterAnnotation": String,

  "UniqueRequestToken": String
 }

Request Parameters

The request accepts the following data in JSON format:

Name Description Required

Title

The title of the HIT. A title should be short and descriptive about the kind of task the HIT contains. On the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, the HIT title appears in search results, and everywhere the HIT is mentioned.

Type: String

Yes

Description

A general description of the HIT. A description includes detailed information about the kind of task the HIT contains. On the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, the HIT description appears in the expanded view of search results, and in the HIT and assignment screens. A good description gives the user enough information to evaluate the HIT before accepting it.

Type: String

Yes

Question

The data the person completing the HIT uses to produce the results. You can learn more about the various ways of specifying this field here

Type: String

Constraints: The XML question data must not be larger than 64 kilobytes (65,535 bytes) in size, including whitespace. Either a Question parameter or a HITLayoutId parameter must be provided.

No

HITLayoutId

The HITLayoutId allows you to use a pre-existing HIT design with placeholder values and create an additional HIT by providing those values as HITLayoutParameters. For more information, see here.

Type: String

Constraints: Either a Question parameter or a HITLayoutId parameter must be provided.

No

HITLayoutParameters

If the HITLayoutId is provided, any placeholder values must be filled in with values using the HITLayoutParameter structure. For more information, see HITLayout.

Type: HITLayoutParameterList

No

Reward

The US Dollar amount the Requester will pay a Worker for successfully completing the HIT.

Type: String

Yes

AssignmentDurationInSeconds

The amount of time, in seconds, that a Worker has to complete the HIT after accepting it. If a Worker does not complete the assignment within the specified duration, the assignment is considered abandoned. If the HIT is still active (that is, its lifetime has not elapsed), the assignment becomes available for other users to find and accept.

Type: Integer

Yes

LifetimeInSeconds

An amount of time, in seconds, after which the HIT is no longer available for users to accept. After the lifetime of the HIT elapses, the HIT no longer appears in HIT searches, even if not all of the assignments for the HIT have been accepted.

Type: Integer

Yes

Keywords

One or more words or phrases that describe the HIT, separated by commas. These words are used in searches to find HITs.

Type: String

Yes

MaxAssignments

The number of times the HIT can be accepted and completed before the HIT becomes unavailable.

Type: Integer

Yes

AutoApprovalDelayInSeconds

The number of seconds after an assignment for the HIT has been submitted, after which the assignment is considered Approved automatically unless the Requester explicitly rejects it.

Type: Integer

No

QualificationRequirements

A condition that a Worker's Qualifications must meet before the Worker is allowed to accept and complete the HIT.

Type: QualificationRequirementList

No

AssignmentReviewPolicy

The Assignment-level Review Policy applies to the assignments under the HIT. You can specify for Mechanical Turk to take various actions based on the policy.

Type: ReviewPolicy

No

HITReviewPolicy

The HIT-level Review Policy applies to the HIT. You can specify for Mechanical Turk to take various actions based on the policy.

Type: ReviewPolicy

No

RequesterAnnotation

An arbitrary data field. The RequesterAnnotation parameter lets your application attach arbitrary data to the HIT for tracking purposes. For example, this parameter could be an identifier internal to the Requester's application that corresponds with the HIT. The RequesterAnnotation parameter for a HIT is only visible to the Requester who created the HIT. It is not shown to the Worker, or any other Requester. The RequesterAnnotation parameter may be different for each HIT you submit. It does not affect how your HITs are grouped.

Type: String

Constraints: must not be longer than 255 characters in length.

No

UniqueRequestToken

A unique identifier for this request. Allows you to retry the call on error without creating duplicate HITs. This is useful in cases such as network timeouts where it is unclear whether or not the call succeeded on the server. If the HIT already exists in the system from a previous call using the same UniqueRequestToken, subsequent calls will return a AWS.MechanicalTurk.HitAlreadyExists error with a message containing the HITId.

Type: String

Constraints: must not be longer than 64 characters in length. It is your responsibility to ensure uniqueness of the token. The unique token expires after 24 hours. Subsequent calls using the same UniqueRequestToken made after the 24 hour limit could create duplicate HITs.

No

Response Elements

A successful request for the CreateHIT operation returns HIT object containing the newly created HIT data.

Example

The following example shows how to use the CreateHIT operation:

Sample Request

The following example creates a simple HIT. The Question parameter takes a block of XML data as its value.

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: mturk-requester.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Content-Length: <PayloadSizeBytes>
X-Amz-Date: <Date>
{
  Title:"Compare two photographs",
  Description:"Compare two pictures and pick one",
  Reward:0.5,
  Question:[XML question data],
  AssignmentDurationInSeconds:0,
  LifetimeInSeconds:604800,
  Keywords:"location, photograph, image, identification, opinion"
}
Tip

Find code samples for MTurk Requester API at AWSLabs on Github

Sample Response

The following is an example response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amzn-RequestId: <RequestId>
Content-Type: application/x-amz-json-1.1
Content-Length: <PayloadSizeBytes>
Date: <Date>
{
  HITId:"789RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE951RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE",
  HITTypeId:"789RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE951RVWYBAZW00EXAMPLE"
}