Expertise Retrieval in Online Community Question Answering

Summary

Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms have emerged as pivotal repositories of collective knowledge, enabling users to pose queries and obtain responses from a distributed pool of participants. Expertise retrieval within these systems focuses on identifying and recommending individuals capable of delivering high‐quality answers. Effective retrieval hinges on modelling user behaviour, topical proficiency and interaction patterns. Approaches span natural language processing to characterise content, network analysis to leverage social graphs, and machine learning to infer latent expertise. Challenges include data sparsity, noise, evolving user interests and the dynamic nature of online communities. Advances in hybrid modelling and graph‐based methods have yielded robust frameworks that adaptively match questions to experts, enhancing answer accuracy and reducing response latency.

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Expertise Retrieval in Online Community Question Answering publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in expertise retrieval in online community question answering across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Expertise retrieval: The process of identifying and recommending users with the relevant knowledge and skill to answer specific questions in online communities.

Graph Convolutional Network (GCN): A neural network architecture that operates on graph‐structured data to learn representations of nodes by aggregating features from neighbouring nodes.

Question routing: A recommendation strategy that matches newly posted questions to potential experts by analysing user activity, interests and community structure.

Factorization Machine: A prediction model that captures interactions between features in high‐dimensional sparse data by decomposing interactions into latent factors.

References

  1. Analysis of community question‐answering issues via machine learning and deep learning: State‐of‐the‐art review. CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology (2022).
  2. Question routing via activity-weighted modularity-enhanced factorization. Social Network Analysis and Mining (2022).
  3. Identifying Experts in Community Question Answering Website Based on Graph Convolutional Neural Network. IEEE Access (2020).

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