Discovering Knowledge-Sharing Communities in Question-Answering Forums

Abstract

In this article, we define a knowledge-sharing community in a question-answering forum as a set of askers and authoritative users such that, within each community, askers exhibit more homogeneous behavior in terms of their interactions with authoritative users than elsewhere. A procedure for discovering members of such a community is devised. As a case study, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large and diverse online question-answering service. Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a method for automatic identification of authoritative actors in Yahoo! Answers. To this end, we estimate and then model the authority scores of participants as a mixture of gamma distributions. The number of components in the mixture is determined using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), while the parameters of each component are estimated using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This method allows us to automatically discriminate between authoritative and nonauthoritative users. Second, we represent the forum environment as a type of transactional data such that each transaction summarizes the interaction of an asker with a specific set of authoritative users. Then, to group askers on the basis of their interactions with authoritative users, we propose a parameter-free transaction data clustering algorithm which is based on a novel criterion function. The identified clusters correspond to the communities that we aim to discover. To evaluate the suitability of our clustering algorithm, we conduct a series of experiments on both synthetic data and public real-life data. Finally, we put our approach to work using data from Yahoo! Answers which represent users’ activities over one full year.