skip to main content
10.1145/2481492.2481493acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageshtConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

A question of complexity: measuring the maturity of online enquiry communities

Published: 01 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Online enquiry communities such as Question Answering (Q&A) websites allow people to seek answers to all kind of questions. With the growing popularity of such platforms, it is important for community managers to constantly monitor the performance of their communities. Although different metrics have been proposed for tracking the evolution of such communities, maturity, the process in which communities become more topic proficient over time, has been largely ignored despite its potential to help in identifying robust communities. In this paper, we interpret community maturity as the proportion of complex questions in a community at a given time. We use the Server Fault (SF) community, a Question Answering (Q&A) community of system administrators, as our case study and perform analysis on question complexity, the level of expertise required to answer a question. We show that question complexity depends on both the length of involvement and the level of contributions of the users who post questions within their community. We extract features relating to askers, answerers, questions and answers, and analyse which features are strongly correlated with question complexity. Although our findings highlight the difficulty of automatically identifying question complexity, we found that complexity is more influenced by both the topical focus and the length of community involvement of askers. Following the identification of question complexity, we define a measure of maturity and analyse the evolution of different topical communities. Our results show that different topical communities show different maturity patterns. Some communities show a high maturity at the beginning while others exhibit slow maturity rate.

References

[1]
Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A., and Mishne, G. Finding high-quality content in social media. ACM Press, p. 183.
[2]
Bachrach, Y., Graepel, T., Minka, T., and Guiver, J. How to grade a test without knowing the Answers - A bayesian graphical model for adaptive crowdsourcing and aptitude testing. arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.6386 (2012).
[3]
Burel, G., He, Y., and Alani, H. Automatic identification of best answers in online enquiry communities. In ESWC2012 (2012), pp. 514--529.
[4]
Butler, B., Sproull, L., Kiesler, S., and Kraut, R. Community effort in online groups: Who does the work and why? Human-Computer Interaction Institute (2007), 90.
[5]
Jurczyk, P., and Agichtein, E. Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis. pp. 919--922.
[6]
Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., and Hartmann, B. Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (2011), pp. 2857--2866.
[7]
Nam, K., Ackerman, M., and Adamic, L. Questions in, knowledge in?: a study of naver's question answering community. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (2009), pp. 779--788.
[8]
Pal, A., Chang, S., and Konstan, J. Evolution of experts in question answering communities. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2012), pp. 274--281.
[9]
Pal, A., Harper, F., and Konstan, J. Exploring question selection bias to identify experts and potential experts in community question answering.
[10]
Pal, A., and Konstan, J. Expert identification in community question answering: exploring question selection bias. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management (2010), ACM, pp. 1505--1508.
[11]
Rowe, M., and Alani, H. What makes communities tick? community health analysis using role compositions.
[12]
Rowe, M., Alani, H., Angeletou, S., and Burel, G. Report on social, technical and corporate needs in online communities. Tech. Rep. 3.1, ROBUST, 2011.
[13]
Sterne, J. Social media metrics: How to measure and optimize your marketing investment. Wiley, 2010.
[14]
Toral, S. L., Martínez-Torres, M. R., Barrero, F., and CortÃl's, F. An empirical study of the driving forces behind online communities. Internet Research 19, 4 (2009), 378--392.
[15]
Welinder, P., Branson, S., Belongie, S., and Perona, P. The multidimensional wisdom of crowds. In In Proc. of NIPS (2010), pp. 2424--2432.
[16]
Wu, M. The community health index. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (New York, NY, USA, 2009), Persuasive '09, ACM, pp. 24:1--24:2.
[17]
Zhang, J., Ackerman, M., and Adamic, L. Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (2007), pp. 221--230.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A study on classifying Stack Overflow questions based on difficulty by utilizing contextual featuresJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111884208(111884)Online publication date: Feb-2024
  • (2019)Activity Archetypes in Question-and-Answer (Q8A) Websites—A Study of 50 Stack Exchange InstancesACM Transactions on Social Computing10.1145/33016122:1(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2019
  • (2017)Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative toolInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.00899(1-20)Online publication date: Mar-2017
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HT '13: Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
May 2013
275 pages
ISBN:9781450319676
DOI:10.1145/2481492
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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. community maturity
  2. question answering
  3. question complexity
  4. social semantic web

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

HT '13
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

HT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 16 of 96 submissions, 17%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)20
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A study on classifying Stack Overflow questions based on difficulty by utilizing contextual featuresJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111884208(111884)Online publication date: Feb-2024
  • (2019)Activity Archetypes in Question-and-Answer (Q8A) Websites—A Study of 50 Stack Exchange InstancesACM Transactions on Social Computing10.1145/33016122:1(1-23)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2019
  • (2017)Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative toolInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.00899(1-20)Online publication date: Mar-2017
  • (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
  • (2015)Predicting Answering Behaviour in Online Question Answering CommunitiesProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media10.1145/2700171.2791041(201-210)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2015
  • (2014)Quantising contribution effort in online communitiesProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2567948.2576949(549-550)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
  • (2013)The 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT2013)ACM SIGWEB Newsletter10.1145/2501187.25011882013:Summer(1-6)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media