A Survey on Assessment and Ranking Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web

User-generated content (UGC) on the Web, especially on social media platforms, facilitates the association of additional information with digital resources; thus, it can provide valuable supplementary content. However, UGC varies in quality and, consequently, raises the challenge of how to maximize its utility for a variety of end-users. This study aims to provide researchers and Web data curators with comprehensive answers to the following questions: What are the existing approaches and methods for assessing and ranking UGC? What features and metrics have been used successfully to assess and predict UGC value across a range of application domains? What methods can be effectively employed to maximize that value? This survey is composed of a systematic review of approaches for assessing and ranking UGC: results are obtained by identifying and comparing methodologies within the context of short text-based UGC on the Web. Existing assessment and ranking approaches adopt one of four framework types: the community-based framework takes into consideration the value assigned to content by a crowd of humans, the end-user--based framework adapts and personalizes the assessment and ranking process with respect to a single end-user, the designer-based framework encodes the software designer’s values in the assessment and ranking method, and the hybrid framework employs methods from more than one of these types. This survey suggests a need for further experimentation and encourages the development of new approaches for the assessment and ranking of UGC.