Hits on question answer portals: exploration of link analysis for author ranking

ABSTRACT

Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are growing in popularity. However, despite the increased popularity, the quality of answers is uneven, and while some users usually provide good answers, many others often provide bad answers. Hence, estimating the authority, or the expected quality of users, is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking and to incentive mechanism design. We adapt a powerful link analysis methodology from the web domain as a first step towards estimating authority in Question Answer portals. Our experimental results over more than 3 million answers from Yahoo! Answers are promising, and warrant further exploration along the lines outlined in this poster.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jiwoon Jeon , W. Bruce Croft , Joon Ho Lee , Soyeon Park, A framework to predict the quality of answers with non-textual features, Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 06-11, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1148170.1148212]
• 2: Jon M. Kleinberg, Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.46 n.5, p.604-632, Sept. 1999 [doi>10.1145/324133.324140]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

General Terms:
Algorithms, Documentation, Experimentation

Keywords:
authority estimation, link analysis, question-answer portals