Combining Latent Factor Model for Dynamic Recommendations in Community Question Answering Forums

Abstract

Community Question Answering (CQA) web service provides a platform for people to share knowledge. Quora, Stack Overflow, and Yahoo! Answers are few sites where questioners post their queries and answerers respond to their respective queries. Due to the ease of use and quick responsiveness of the CQA platform, these sites are being widely adopted by the community. For better usability, there is a dire need to route the question toward the relevant answerers. To fulfil this gap, recommender systems play an important role in identifying the relevant answerers. To map the user interests more effectively, this research work proposed a dynamic feature representation of the latent user attributes for user profiling. The latent features are mapped by leveraging the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling of user data. The proposed recommendation model segments the user profile based on these latent user profiles incorporating the incremental learning of the users’ interests to produce the relevant recommendations in near real time. The experimental setup generated recommendation lists of variable sizes and evaluated using multiple evaluation metrics, such as mean average precision, recall, throughput, and different quality metrics, such as discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. The results showed that the proposed model provided a better quality of recommendations in CQA forums, which is promising for future research in this domain.