Finding expert users in community question answering

  • Authors:

  • Fatemeh Riahi;Zainab Zolaktaf;Mahdi Shafiei;Evangelos Milios

  • Affiliations:

  • Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada;Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada;Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada;Dalhousie Univeristy, Halifax, NS, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Community Question Answering (CQA) websites provide a rapidly growing source of information in many areas. This rapid growth, while offering new opportunities, puts forward new challenges. In most CQA implementations there is little effort in directing new questions to the right group of experts. This means that experts are not provided with questions matching their expertise, and therefore new matching questions may be missed and not receive a proper answer. We focus on finding experts for a newly posted question. We investigate the suitability of two statistical topic models for solving this issue and compare these methods against more traditional Information Retrieval approaches. We show that for a dataset constructed from the Stackoverflow website, these topic models outperform other methods in retrieving a candidate set of best experts for a question. We also show that the Segmented Topic Model gives consistently better performance compared to the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model.