Predicting Answering Behaviour in Online Question Answering Communities

Burel, Gregoire; Mulholland, Paul; He, Yulan and Alani, Harith (2015). Predicting Answering Behaviour in Online Question Answering Communities. In: HT '15 Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media, ACM, pp. 201–210.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2700171.2791041

Abstract

The value of Question Answering (Q&A) communities is de- pendent on members of the community finding the questions they are most willing and able to answer. This can be diffi- cult in communities with a high volume of questions. Much previous has work attempted to address this problem by recommending questions similar to those already answered. However, this approach disregards the question selection behaviour of the answers and how it is affected by factors such as question recency and reputation. In this paper, we identify the parameters that correlate with such a behaviour by analysing the users’ answering patterns in a Q&A com- munity. We then generate a model to predict which question a user is most likely to answer next. We train Learning to Rank (LTR) models to predict question selections using various user, question and thread feature sets. We show that answering behaviour can be predicted with a high level of success, and highlight the particular features that influence users’ question selections.

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