research-article

Collective intelligence in the online social network of yahoo!answers and its implications

Authors:

Joseph Edward GrantAuthors Info & Claims

CIKM '12: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

Pages 455 - 464

https://doi.org/10.1145/2396761.2396821

Published: 29 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites such as Yahoo!Answers provide a platform where users can post questions and receive answers. These systems take advantage of the collective intelligence of users to find information. In this paper, we analyze the online social network (OSN) in Yahoo!Answers. Based on a large amount of our collected data, we studied the OSN's structural properties, which reveals strikingly distinct properties such as low link symmetry and weak correlation between indegree and outdegree. After studying the knowledge base and behaviors of the users, we find that a small number of top contributors answer most of the questions in the system. Also, each top contributor focuses on only a few knowledge categories. In addition, the knowledge categories of the users are highly clustered. We also study the knowledge base in a user's social network, which reveals that the members in a user's social network share only a few knowledge categories. Based on the findings, we provide guidance in the design of spammer detection algorithms and distributed Q&A systems. We also propose a friendship-knowledge oriented Q&A framework that synergically combines current OSN-based Q&A and web Q&A. We believe that the results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding the collective intelligence in the web Q&A OSNs and lay a cornerstone for the evolution of next-generation Q&A systems.

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Freeman GBardzell JBardzell SMcNeese N(2019)The Innovation Ecology: Collaborative Information, Community Support, and Policy in a Creative Technology CommunityInformation in Contemporary Society10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_58(614-624)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2019
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Li ZChandler HShen H(2018)Analysis of Knowledge Sharing Activities on a Social Network Incorporated Discussion Forum: A Case Study of DISboardsIEEE Transactions on Big Data10.1109/TBDATA.2017.27493074:4(432-446)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
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Index Terms

Collective intelligence in the online social network of yahoo!answers and its implications
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
  2. Information storage systems

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cover image ACM Conferences

CIKM '12: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

October 2012

2840 pages

ISBN:9781450311564

DOI:10.1145/2396761

General Chair:
Xuewen Chen
Wayne State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Guy Lebanon
Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Haixun Wang
Microsoft Research Asia
,
Mohammed J. Zaki
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

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: 29 October 2012

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CIKM'12: 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

October 29 - November 2, 2012

Hawaii, Maui, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,861 of 8,427 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Freeman GMcNeese N(2021)A Tale of Creativity and StrugglesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491505:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449150
Freeman GBardzell JBardzell SMcNeese N(2019)The Innovation Ecology: Collaborative Information, Community Support, and Policy in a Creative Technology CommunityInformation in Contemporary Society10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_58(614-624)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_58
Li ZChandler HShen H(2018)Analysis of Knowledge Sharing Activities on a Social Network Incorporated Discussion Forum: A Case Study of DISboardsIEEE Transactions on Big Data10.1109/TBDATA.2017.27493074:4(432-446)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2017.2749307
Lin YShen H(2018)SmartQ: A Question and Answer System for Supplying High-Quality and Trustworthy AnswersIEEE Transactions on Big Data10.1109/TBDATA.2017.27354424:4(600-613)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2017.2735442
Shen HWang G(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
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.2016.2580606
Liu GShen H(2017)iASKIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2016.261886428:5(1346-1360)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2016.2618864
Shen HLiu GWang HVithlani N(2017)SocialQ&A: An Online Social Network Based Question and Answer SystemIEEE Transactions on Big Data10.1109/TBDATA.2016.26294873:1(91-106)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2016.2629487
Srba IBielikova M(2016)A Comprehensive Survey and Classification of Approaches for Community Question AnsweringACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/293468710:3(1-63)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2016
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Liu GShen H(2015)iASK: a distributed Q&A system incorporating social community and global collective intelligence2015 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P)10.1109/P2P.2015.7328516(1-10)Online publication date: Sep-2015
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Liu GShen H(2015)Deadline guaranteed service for multi-tenant cloud storage2015 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P)10.1109/P2P.2015.7328515(1-10)Online publication date: Sep-2015
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