On the evolution of the yahoo! answers QA community

ABSTRACT

While question answering communities have been gaining popularity for several years, we wonder if the increased popularity actually improves or degrades the user experience. In addition, automatic QA systems, which utilize different sources such as search engines and social media, are emerging rapidly. QA communities have already created abundant resources of millions of questions and hundreds of millions of answers. The question whether they will continue to serve as an effective source is of information for web search and question answering is of vital importance. In this poster, we investigate the temporal evolution of a popular QA community - Yahoo! Answers, with respect to its effectiveness in answering three basic types of questions: factoid, opinion and complex questions. Our experiments show that Yahoo! Answers keeps growing rapidly, while its overall quality as an information source for factoid question-answering degrades. However, instead of answering factoid questions, it might be more effective to answer opinion and complex questions.

REFERENCES

• 1: Eugene Agichtein , Carlos Castillo , Debora Donato , Aristides Gionis , Gilad Mishne, Finding high-quality content in social media, Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining, February 11-12, 2008, Palo Alto, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1341531.1341557]
• 2: Jimmy Lin , Boris Katz, Question answering from the web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques, Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 03-08, 2003, New Orleans, LA, USA [doi>10.1145/956863.956886]
• 3: Atsushi Sugiura , Oren Etzioni, Query routing for Web search engines: architectures and experiments, Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, v.33 n.1-6, p.417-429, June 2000
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Question-answering (fact retrieval) systems**

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process; Selection process
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement

Keywords:
question answering, social media