How Question Characteristics Impact Answer Outcomes on Social Question-and-Answer Websites

This work aims to document a two-sided impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on online question and answer communities. It implements empirical analyses on subsidiary communities affiliating to the Stack Exchange network. Using a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of the pandemic on community volume (the counts of questions and answers) and responsiveness (the likelihood of questions to be answered), this work has the following discoveries. First, the community volume grows, both in questions and answers, driven by a prolonged time of staying at home during the pandemic. Second, the community responsiveness declines, driven by an influx of new community members during the pandemic, which is also a result of the prolonged time of staying at home. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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“…Previous literature on the Q&A communities has proposed various internal factors to member engagement (Wu et al, 2019;Y. Zhao et al, 2021).…”

Section: Online Qanda Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploration Study on the Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Online Q&A Communities

Huang

Wang

2022

Journal of Global Information Management

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“…Second, this research delves deeper into knowledge co-creation in STEM and non-STEM topics by examining RNs, which are different from prior research investigating the counts, lengths, quality, and content of answers (A. M. Peterson et al, 2017;Y. Zhao et al, 2021;Z.…”

Section: Implications and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Fourth, prior studies mostly investigated the effect of questions by measuring the counts, lengths, quality, and content of answers (A. M. Peterson & Acevedo Callejas, 2021;Chua & Banerjee, 2015b;Jeng et al, 2017;Y. Zhao et al, 2021), losing sight of the diversity of responders' CQA participation types influenced by question cues.…”

Section: Problem Statement and Research Gapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effects of question cues on responses and responders in community question-answering: a goal-framing approach

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Computational approaches to detect experts in distributed online communities: a case study on Reddit

2023

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The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q & A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. From more than a decade, the expert finding problem attracted much attention in information retrieval research. Based on the encountered gaps in the expert identification across several Q & A portals, we inspect the feasibility of identifying data science experts in Reddit. Our method is based on the manual coding results where two data science experts labelled not only expert and non-expert comments, but also out-of-scope comments, which is a novel contribution to the literature, enabling the identification of more groups of comments across web portals. We present a semi-supervised approach which combines 1113 labelled comments with 100,226 unlabelled comments during training. We proved that it is possible to develop models that can identify expert, non-expert and out-of-scope comments peaking the AUC score at 0.93, accuracy at 0.83, MAE at 0.15 degrees and R2 score at 0.69. The proposed model uses the activity behaviour of every user, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), crowdsourced and user feature sets. We conclude that the NLP and user feature sets contribute the most to the better identification of these three classes. It means that this method can generalise well within the domain. Finally, we make a novel contribution by presenting different types of users in Reddit, which opens many future research directions.

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How Question Characteristics Impact Answer Outcomes on Social Question-and-Answer Websites

Cited by 9 publications

References 56 publications

An Exploration Study on the Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Online Q&A Communities

An Exploration Study on the Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Online Q&A Communities

The effects of question cues on responses and responders in community question-answering: a goal-framing approach

Computational approaches to detect experts in distributed online communities: a case study on Reddit

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