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Tapping on the potential of q&a community by recommending answer providers

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The rapidly increasing popularity of community-based Question Answering (cQA) services, e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Zhidao, etc. have attracted great attention from both academia and industry. Besides the basic problems, like question searching and answer finding, it should be noted that the low participation rate of users in cQA service is the crucial problem which limits its development potential. In this paper, we focus on addressing this problem by recommending answer providers, in which a question is given as a query and a ranked list of users is returned according to the likelihood of answering the question. Based on the intuitive idea for recommendation, we try to introduce topic-level model to improve heuristic term-level methods, which are treated as the baselines. The proposed approach consists of two steps: (1) discovering latent topics in the content of questions and answers as well as latent interests of users to build user profiles; (2) recommending question answerers for new arrival questions based on latent topics and term-level model. Specifically, we develop a general generative model for questions and answers in cQA, which is then altered to obtain a novel computationally tractable Bayesian network model. Experiments are carried out on a real-world data crawled from Yahoo! Answers during Jun 12 2007 to Aug 04 2007, which consists of 118510 questions, 772962 answers and 150324 users. The experimental results reveal significant improvements over the baseline methods and validate the positive influence of topic-level information.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '08: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
October 2008
1562 pages
ISBN:9781595939913
DOI:10.1145/1458082
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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Published: 26 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. community-based question answering
  2. gibbs sampling
  3. latent topic modeling
  4. question answerer recommendation

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CIKM08
CIKM08: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
October 26 - 30, 2008
California, Napa Valley, USA

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  • (2024)Characterizing and classifying developer forum posts with their intentionsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10487-z29:4Online publication date: 5-Jun-2024
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