Discovering Authoritative users in Question Answer Communities: A Case Study of Stack Overflow

Abstract

Question answer communities such as Stack Overflow and Yahoo! Answers are becoming more and more popular knowledge sharing communities, which have attracted great interest from both industry and academia. On such communities, people can ask questions of any kind and then wait for someone else to answer the questions. Nevertheless, in many cases, the questioners cannot get satisfactory answers from the answerers. In order to make the questioners obtain satisfactory answers, it is very necessary for question answer communities to know how to find the authoritative users and recommend some authoritative answerers to the questioners. We consider the problem of identifying authoritative users in Stack Overflow. So far, many methods have been proposed to automatically discover authoritative users in question answer communities. A common method is to use link analysis technique such as PageRank and HITS. The main problem with this method is that it does not consider an important factor, the time factor. In this paper, we investigate the time aspect of ranking with application in the Stack Overflow. The result shows that the proposed method is highly effective.

Who are influential in Q&A communities? A measure of V-Constraint based on knowledge diffusion capability

“…There is a surge of research on Q&A communities due to their importance for knowledge diffusion and open-ended complex problem solving [15–17]. Popular topics include identification of authorities [18,19] and topical experts [20] based on classical algorithms such as PageRank and Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS), which are widely used for finding key users in social network. We review these methods in the following subsections.…”