Automatic identification of best answers in online enquiry communities

Grégoire Burel, Yulan He, Harith Alani

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Online communities are prime sources of information. The Web is rich with forums and Question Answering (Q&A) communities where people go to seek answers to all kinds of questions. Most systems employ manual answer-rating procedures to encourage people to provide quality answers and to help users locate the best answers in a given thread. However, in the datasets we collected from three online communities, we found that half their threads lacked best answer markings. This stresses the need for methods to assess the quality of available answers to: 1) provide automated ratings to fill in for, or support, manually assigned ones, and; 2) to assist users when browsing such answers by filtering in potential best answers. In this paper, we collected data from three online communities and converted it to RDF based on the SIOC ontology. We then explored an approach for predicting best answers using a combination of content, user, and thread features. We show how the influence of such features on predicting best answers differs across communities. Further we demonstrate how certain features unique to some of our community systems can boost predictability of best answers.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe semantic web : research and applications
Subtitle of host publication9th extended semantic web conference, ESWC 2012, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 27-31, 2012. Proceedings
EditorsElena Simperl, Philipp Cimiano, Axel Polleres, Oscar Corcho, Valentina Presutti
Place of PublicationHeidelberg (DE)
PublisherSpringer
Pages514-529
Number of pages16
Volume7295
ISBN (Electronic)978/3/642-30284-8
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-30283-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event9th extended semantic web conference, ESWC 2012 - Heraklion, Greece
Duration: 27 May 201231 May 2012

Publication series

NameLecture notes in computer science
PublisherSpringer
Volume7295
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th extended semantic web conference, ESWC 2012
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityHeraklion
Period27/05/1231/05/12

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