An Analytical Framework for Understanding Knowledge-Sharing Processes in Online Q&A Communities

Abstract

Online communities have become popular knowledge sources for both individuals and organizations. Computer-mediated communication research shows that communication patterns play an important role in the collaborative efforts of online knowledge-sharing activities. Existing research is mainly focused on either user egocentric positions in communication networks or communication patterns at the community level. Very few studies examine thread-level communication and process patterns and their impacts on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing. In this study, we fill this research gap by proposing an innovative analytical framework for understanding thread-level knowledge sharing in online Q&A communities based on dialogue act theory, network analysis, and process mining. More specifically, we assign a dialogue act tag for each post in a discussion thread to capture its conversation purpose and then apply graph and process mining algorithms to examine knowledge-sharing processes. Our results, which are based on a real support forum dataset, show that the proposed analytical framework is effective in identifying important communication, conversation, and process patterns that lead to helpful knowledge sharing in online Q&A communities.

Information worth spreading: An exploration of information sharing from social q&a to other social media platforms

“…Previous research on SQA sites mainly focused on areas such as question classification (e.g., Harper, Weinberg, Logie, & Konstan, 2010), quality assessment and detection (e.g., Yao et al, 2015), user motivations (e.g., Jin et al, 2015), and knowledge sharing (e.g., G. Wang, H. Wang, Li, Abrahams, & Fan, 2014). Among these areas, knowledge and information sharing within SQA sites have been topics of continued interest because of their impact on users' daily lives.…”

QRFA: A Data-Driven Model of Information-Seeking Dialogues

“…Di Ciccio and Mecella [6] use a corpus of e-mail correspondence to illustrate how the structure of a complex collaborative process can be extracted from message exchanges. Wang et al [29] analyze a sample of discussion threads from an on-line Q&A forum by applying process mining and network analysis techniques and comparing patterns discovered across different thread categories based on their outcomes (solved, helpful and unhelpful threads).…”

Exploring Digital Conversation Corpora with Process Mining

“…1 A conversation process. Reproduced with permission from (Winograd and Flores 1986) Exploring Digital Conversation Corpora with Process Mining Wang et al (2014) applied PM to threads of questions and answers in an online web forum. They managed to differentiate useful threads, leading to accepted answers, from inconclusive ones and also found correlations with the number of comments and users involved in their development.…”

“…Several works in natural language processing make use of speech acts to model various specialized verbal exchanges, including interactions via email (Carvalho and Cohen 2005;De Felice et al 2013), Twitter messages (Zhang et al 2011;Epure et al 2017), web forums (Bhatia et al 2012;Wang et al 2014;Arguello and Shaffer 2015). These studies adopt one of two general strategies in approaching speech act theory: either they start from Searle's five types of speech acts (Searle 1976) and extend them with custom classes as needed to fit their corpus (for example, in Carvalho and Cohen 2005;Zhang et al 2011), or they constitute ad hoc classes of conversational units, dependent on some specific corpora, that can only to a lesser extent be considered speech acts (Wang et al 2014;Bhatia et al 2012).…”

“…These studies adopt one of two general strategies in approaching speech act theory: either they start from Searle's five types of speech acts (Searle 1976) and extend them with custom classes as needed to fit their corpus (for example, in Carvalho and Cohen 2005;Zhang et al 2011), or they constitute ad hoc classes of conversational units, dependent on some specific corpora, that can only to a lesser extent be considered speech acts (Wang et al 2014;Bhatia et al 2012).…”