Skip to main content
Log in

Formulation of a hybrid expertise retrieval system in community question answering services

  • Published:
Applied Intelligence Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a hybrid expertise retrieval system for community question answering services. The proposed system consists of two segments: a text based segment and a network based segment. For a given question, the text based segment estimates users’ knowledge introducing two new concepts: question hardness and question answerer association. The network based segment, moreover, incorporates users’ relative performances into the network structure. We denote the outputs of these two segments as knowledge score and authority score, respectively. We aggregate these two scores using a fusion technique to quantify the expertise of a given user for a given question. We have generated four datasets by downloading questions and answers from Yahoo! Answers. The performance of the proposed system is found to be superior than that of 18 state-of-the-art algorithms on these four real-world datasets.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://answers.yahoo.com/

  2. http://zhidao.baidu.com/

  3. http://stackoverflow.com/

  4. http://answers.wikia.com/

  5. http://www.quora.com/

References

  1. Liu X, Croft WB, Koll M (2005) Finding experts in community-based question-answering services. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. ACM, pp 315–316

  2. Kabutoya Y, Iwata T, Shiohara H, Fujimura K (2010) Effective question recommendation based on multiple features for question answering communities. In: Proceedings of the fourth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media

  3. Li B, King I (2010) Routing questions to appropriate answerers in community question answering services. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, pp 1585–1588

  4. Li B, King I, Lyu MR (2011) Question routing in community question answering: putting category in its place. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, pp 2041–2044

  5. Zhang J, Ackerman MS, Adamic L (2007) Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, pp 221–230

  6. Jurczyk P, Agichtein E (2007) Hits on question answer portals: exploration of link analysis for author ranking. In: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 845–846

  7. Jurczyk P, Agichtein E (2007) Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis. In: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, pp 919–922

  8. Chen L, Nayak R (2008) Expertise analysis in a question answer portal for author ranking. In: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence and intelligent agent technology, vol 01. IEEE Computer Society, pp 134–140

  9. Schall D, Skopik F (2011) An analysis of the structure and dynamics of large-scale q/a communities. In: Eder J, Bielikova M, Tjoa A M (eds) Advances in databases and information systems. Springer, Berlin, pp 285–301

  10. Aslay Ç, O’Hare N, Aiello LM, Jaimes A (2013) Competition-based networks for expert finding. In: Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 1033–1036

  11. Shahriari M, Parekodi S, Klamma R (2015) Community-aware ranking algorithms for expert identification in question-answer forums. In: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on knowledge technologies and data-driven business - i-KNOW ’15, pp 1–8

  12. Kao WC, Liu DR, Wang SW (2010) Expert finding in question-answering websites: a novel hybrid approach. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM symposium on applied computing. ACM, pp 867–871

  13. Liu DR, Chen YH, Kao WC, Wang HW (2013) Integrating expert profile, reputation and link analysis for expert finding in question-answering websites. Inf Process Manag 49(1):312–329

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Wang GA, Jiao J, Abrahams AS, Fan W, Zhang Z (2013) ExpertRank: a topic-aware expert finding algorithm for online knowledge communities. Decis Support Syst 54(3):1442–1451

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Page L, Brin S, Motwani R, Winograd T (1999) The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. Tech. rep., Stanford InfoLab

  16. Kleinberg JM (1999) Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. J ACM (JACM) 46(5):604–632

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. Lu Y, Quan X, Ni X, Liu W, Xu Y (2009) Latent link analysis for expert finding in user-interactive question answering services. In: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on semantics, knowledge and grid, 2009. SKG 2009. IEEE, pp 54–59

  18. Li H, Jin S, Li S (2015) A hybrid model for experts finding in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the - 2015 international conference on cyber-enabled distributed computing and knowledge discovery, CyberC 2015, pp 176–184

  19. Zhou G, Lai S, Liu K, Zhao J (2012) Topic-sensitive probabilistic model for expert finding in question answer communities. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, pp 1662–1666

  20. Yang L, Qiu M, Gottipati S, Zhu F, Jiang J, Sun H, Chen Z (2013) Cqarank: jointly model topics and expertise in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on information & knowledge management. ACM, pp 99–108

  21. Liu X, Ye S, Li X, Luo Y, Rao Y (2015) ZhihuRank: a topic-sensitive expert finding algorithm in community question answering websites. In: Proceedings of the international conference on web-based learning. Springer, pp 165–173

  22. Dror G, Koren Y, Maarek Y, Szpektor I (2011) I want to answer; who has a question?: Yahoo! answers recommender system. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, pp 1109–1117

  23. Zhou TC, Lyu MR, King I (2012) A classification-based approach to question routing in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, pp 783–790

  24. Zhao Z, Zhang L, He X, Ng W (2015) Expert finding for question answering via graph regularized matrix completion. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 27(4):993–1004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Yan Z, Zhou J (2015) Optimal answerer ranking for new questions in community question answering. Inf Process Manag 51(1):163–178

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Zhao Z, Yang Q, Cai D, He X, Zhuang Y (2016) Expert finding for community-based question answering via ranking metric network learning. In: IJCAI, pp 3000–3006

  27. Azzam A, Tazi N, Hossny A (2017) Text-based question routing for question answering communities via deep learning. In: Proceedings of the symposium on applied computing. ACM, pp 1674–1678

  28. Neshati M, Fallahnejad Z, Beigy H (2017) On dynamicity of expert finding in community question answering. Inf Process Manag 53(5):1026–1042

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Cheng X, Zhu S, Su S, Chen G (2017) A multi-objective optimization approach for question routing in community question answering sevices. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 29(9):1779–1792

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Balog K, Bogers T, Azzopardi L, De Rijke M, Van Den Bosch A (2007) Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments. In: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 551–558

  31. Xu Z, Ramanathan J (2016) Thread-based probabilistic models for expert finding in enterprise Microblogs. Expert Syst Appl 43:286–297

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Deng H, King I, Lyu MR (2008) Formal models for expert finding on dblp bibliography data. In: Proceedings of the eighth IEEE international conference on data mining, 2008. ICDM’08. IEEE, pp 163–172

  33. Deng H, King I, Lyu MR (2012) Enhanced models for expertise retrieval using community-aware strategies. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Part B (Cybern) 42(1):93–106

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Neshati M, Hashemi SH, Beigy H (2014) Expertise finding in bibliographic network: topic dominance learning approach. IEEE Trans Cybern 44(12):2646–2657

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Horowitz D, Kamvar SD (2010) The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine. In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. ACM, pp 431–440

  36. Balog K, De Rijke M, Weerkamp W (2008) Bloggers as experts: feed distillation using expert retrieval models. In: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 753–754

  37. Jin J, Li Y, Zhong X, Zhai L (2015) Why users contribute knowledge to online communities: an empirical study of an online social Q&A community. Inf Manag 52(7):840–849

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Liu Z, Jansen BJ (2016) Understanding and predicting question subjectivity in social question and answering. IEEE Trans Comput Soc Syst 3(1):32–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Zhou G, Zhou Y, He T, Wu W (2016) Learning semantic representation with neural networks for community question answering retrieval. Know-Based Syst 93(C):75–83

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Figueroa A, Gȯmez-Pantoja C, Herrera I (2016) Search clicks analysis for discovering temporally anchored questions in community question answering. Expert Syst Appl 50:89–99

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Espina A, Figueroa A (2017) Why was this asked? Automatically recognizing multiple motivations behind community question-answering questions. Expert Syst Appl 80:126–135

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Ahmed T, Srivastava A (2017) An automated approach to estimate human interest. Appl Intell 47 (4):1186–1207

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Zhang Z, Xu G, Zhang P, Wang Y (2017) Personalized recommendation algorithm for social networks based on comprehensive trust. Appl Intell 47(3):659–669

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Wu F, Duan X, Xiao J, Zhao Z, Tang S, Zhang Y, Zhuang Y (2017) Temporal interaction and causal influence in community-based question answering. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 29(10):2304–2317

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Neshati M (2017) On early detection of high voted Q&A on stack overflow. Inf Process Manag 53(4):780–798

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Romeo S, Da San Martino G, Belinkov Y, Barrȯn-Cedeṅo A, Eldesouki M, Darwish K, Mubarak H, Glass J, Moschitti A (2017) Language processing and learning models for community question answering in Arabic. Inf Process Manag 0:1–17

    Google Scholar 

  47. Wang F, Wu W, Li Z, Zhou M (2017) Named entity disambiguation for questions in community question answering. Know-Based Syst 126(C):68–77

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Kiritchenko S, Matwin S, Nock R, Famili AF (2006) Learning and evaluation in the presence of class hierarchies: application to text categorization. In: Lamontagne L, Marchand M (eds) Advances in artificial intelligence. Springer, Berlin, pp 395–406

  49. Kosmopoulos A, Partalas I, Gaussier E, Paliouras G, Androutsopoulos I (2015) Evaluation measures for hierarchical classification: a unified view and novel approaches. Data Min Knowl Discov 29(3):820–865

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  50. Miller DRH, Leek T, Schwartz RM (1999) A hidden Markov model information retrieval system. In: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 214–221

  51. Lavrenko V, Croft WB (2001) Relevance based language models. In: Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 120–127

  52. Liu X, Croft WB (2004) Cluster-based retrieval using language models. In: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 186–193

  53. Cao Y, Liu J, Bao S, Li H (2005) Research on expert search at enterprise track of TREC 2005. In: TREC

  54. Zhang J, Tang J, Li J (2007) Expert finding in a social network. In: International conference on database systems for advanced applications. Springer, pp 1066–1069

  55. Blei DM, Ng AY, Jordan MI (2003) Latent Dirichlet allocation. J Mach Learn Res 3:993–1022

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  56. Kolda TG, Sun J (2008) Scalable tensor decompositions for multi-aspect data mining. In: Eighth IEEE International conference on data mining, 2008. ICDM’08. IEEE, pp 363–372

  57. Huang PS, He X, Gao J, Deng L, Acero A, Heck L (2013) Learning deep structured semantic models for web search using clickthrough data. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on conference on information & knowledge management. ACM, pp 2333–2338

  58. Ponte JM, Croft WB (1998) A language modeling approach to information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 275–281

  59. Liu X, Bollen J, Nelson ML, de Sompel HV (2005) Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community. Inf Process Manag 41(6):1462–1480

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Li L, Shang Y, Zhang W (2002) Improvement of hits-based algorithms on web documents. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web, WWW ’02. ACM, New York, pp 527–535

  61. Zhang M, Song R, Lin C, Ma S, Jiang Z, Jin Y, Liu Y, Zhao L, Ma S (2003) Expansion-based technologies in finding relevant and new information: thu trec 2002: novelty track experiments. NIST Spec Publ SP 251:586–590

    Google Scholar 

  62. Chang S, Pal A (2013) Routing questions for collaborative answering in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining. ACM, pp 494–501

  63. Balog K, Azzopardi L, De Rijke M (2006) Formal models for expert finding in enterprise corpora. In: Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 43–50

  64. Yeniterzi R (2016) Effective and efficient approaches to retrieving and using expertise in social media. SIGIR Forum 49(2):152– 153

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Wang L, Wu B, Yang J, Peng S (2016) Personalized recommendation for new questions in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining. ASONAM, pp 901–908

  66. Riahi F, Zolaktaf Z, Shafiei M, Milios E (2012) Finding expert users in community question answering. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on world wide web. WWW ’12 Companion. ACM, New York, pp 791–798

  67. Liu J, Jia B, Xu H, Liu B, Gao D, Li B (2017) A topicrank based document priors model for expert finding. In: Fei M, Ma S, Li X, Sun X, Jia L, Su Z (eds) Advanced computational methods in life system modeling and simulation. Springer, Singapore, pp 334–341

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dipankar Kundu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Kundu, D., Mandal, D.P. Formulation of a hybrid expertise retrieval system in community question answering services. Appl Intell 49, 463–477 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-018-1286-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-018-1286-z

Keywords

Navigation