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On the evolution of the yahoo! answers QA community

Published: 20 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

While question answering communities have been gaining popularity for several years, we wonder if the increased popularity actually improves or degrades the user experience. In addition, automatic QA systems, which utilize different sources such as search engines and social media, are emerging rapidly. QA communities have already created abundant resources of millions of questions and hundreds of millions of answers. The question whether they will continue to serve as an effective source is of information for web search and question answering is of vital importance. In this poster, we investigate the temporal evolution of a popular QA community - Yahoo! Answers, with respect to its effectiveness in answering three basic types of questions: factoid, opinion and complex questions. Our experiments show that Yahoo! Answers keeps growing rapidly, while its overall quality as an information source for factoid question-answering degrades. However, instead of answering factoid questions, it might be more effective to answer opinion and complex questions.

References

[1]
E. Agichtein, C. Castillo, D. Donato, A. Gionis, and G. Mishne, Finding High Quality Content in Social Media, with an Application to Community-Based Question Answering, in Proc. of WSDM 2008
[2]
J. Lin and B. Katz, Question Answering from the Web Using Knowledge Annotation and Knowledge Mining Techniques, in Proc. of CIKM 2003
[3]
A. Sugiura and O. Etzioni, Query routing for Web search engines: architecture and experiments, Computer Networks, Volume 33, Issues 1-6, 2000
[4]
E. M. Voorhees, Overview of the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track, in Proc. of TREEC 2003

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '08: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
July 2008
934 pages
ISBN:9781605581644
DOI:10.1145/1390334
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 July 2008

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  1. question answering
  2. social media

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  • (2020)Large-Scale Question Tagging via Joint Question-Topic Embedding LearningACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/338095438:2(1-23)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2020
  • (2018)Web Forum Retrieval and Text AnalyticsFoundations and Trends in Information Retrieval10.1561/150000006212:1(1-163)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2018
  • (2018)Identifying Informational vs. Conversational Questions on Community Question Answering ArchivesProceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3159652.3159733(216-224)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Accurate Sentence Matching with Hybrid Siamese NetworksProceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3132847.3133156(2235-2238)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2017
  • (2017)Can Dynamic Knowledge-Sharing Activities Be Mirrored From the Static Online Social Network in Yahoo! Answers and How to Improve Its Quality of Service?IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems10.1109/TSMC.2016.258060647:12(3363-3376)Online publication date: Dec-2017
  • (2017)Semi-supervised learning for question classification in CQANatural Computing: an international journal10.1007/s11047-016-9554-516:4(567-577)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
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  • (2015)SimQ: Real-Time Retrieval of Similar Consumer Health QuestionsJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/jmir.338817:2(e43)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2015
  • (2015)Semi-supervised Question Classification Based on Ensemble LearningAdvances in Swarm and Computational Intelligence10.1007/978-3-319-20472-7_37(341-348)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2015
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