Making Sense of Responders' Evaluations of Question Answerability from Academic Q&A Sites

Abstract

In academic Q&A, question cues are characteristics of natural language for responders to understand askers' needs. However, knowledge is limited concerning responders' answerability evaluations which could be influenced by question cues (e.g., emotional expressiveness, complexity) and topic types. To address the gap, this research conducted an experiment to investigate how different question cues and topic types influence evaluations of question answerability. Sentiment analyses were conducted to assess responders' evaluations of question answerability. Results showed that responders favored answering complex questions rather than simple ones. Responders also held more divergent opinions regarding whether to answer STEM questions with different cues while holding a more inclusive answerability evaluation of non‐STEM questions.