Recommending forum posts to designated experts

Jason H.D. Cho, Yanen Li, Roxana Girju, Chengxiang Zhai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

There are users who generate significant amounts of domain knowledge in online forums or community question and answer (CQA) websites. Existing literature defines them as 'experts.' These users attain such statuses by providing multiple relevant answers to the question askers. Past works have focused on recommending relevant posts to these users. With the rise of web forums where certified experts answer questions, strategies that are tailored towards addressing the new type of experts will be beneficial. In this paper, we identify a new type of user called 'designated experts' (i.e., users designated as domain experts by the web administrators). These are the experts who are guaranteed by web administrators to be an expert in a given domain. Our focus is on how we can capture the unique behavior of designated experts in an online domain. We have noticed designated experts have different behaviors compared to CQA experts. In particular, unlike existing CQAs, only one designated expert responds to any given thread. To capture this intuition, we introduce a matrix factorization algorithm with regularization to capture the behavior. Our results show that the regularization method improves the performance significantly compared to the baseline approach.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2015
EditorsFeng Luo, Kemafor Ogan, Mohammed J. Zaki, Laura Haas, Beng Chin Ooi, Vipin Kumar, Sudarsan Rachuri, Saumyadipta Pyne, Howard Ho, Xiaohua Hu, Shipeng Yu, Morris Hui-I Hsiao, Jian Li
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages659-666
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781479999255
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 22 2015
Event3rd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2015 - Santa Clara, United States
Duration: Oct 29 2015Nov 1 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2015

Other

Other3rd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Clara
Period10/29/1511/1/15

Keywords

  • Designated Experts
  • Matrix factorization
  • Online Forums
  • Recommender Systems

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Recommending forum posts to designated experts'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this