Tapping on the potential of q&a community by recommending answer providers

The rapidly increasing popularity of community-based Question Answering (cQA) services, e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Zhidao, etc. have attracted great attention from both academia and industry. Besides the basic problems, like question searching and answer finding, it should be noted that the low participation rate of users in cQA service is the crucial problem which limits its development potential. In this paper, we focus on addressing this problem by recommending answer providers, in which a question is given as a query and a ranked list of users is returned according to the likelihood of answering the question. Based on the intuitive idea for recommendation, we try to introduce topic-level model to improve heuristic term-level methods, which are treated as the baselines. The proposed approach consists of two steps: (1) discovering latent topics in the content of questions and answers as well as latent interests of users to build user profiles; (2) recommending question answerers for new arrival questions based on latent topics and term-level model. Specifically, we develop a general generative model for questions and answers in cQA, which is then altered to obtain a novel computationally tractable Bayesian network model. Experiments are carried out on a real-world data crawled from Yahoo! Answers during Jun 12 2007 to Aug 04 2007, which consists of 118510 questions, 772962 answers and 150324 users. The experimental results reveal significant improvements over the baseline methods and validate the positive influence of topic-level information.