Towards Detecting Appropriate Respondents to Questions Posted at Q&A Sites by Disregarding and Considering Categories of Answer Statements

Abstract

This paper tries to find the possibility of searching respondents capable of giving appropriate answers to a newly posted question in order to eliminate mismatches between the intentions of questioners and respondents of Question and Answer sites. The impressions of sixty questions and their responses posted at Yahoo! Chiebukuro have been experimentally evaluated. By applying factor analysis to the scores of the experiment, the impression of the statements could be captured by nine factors. Factor scores can be estimated by using the features including syntactic information, word imageability, closing sentence expressions, word familiarity, and notation validity. The good overall estimation accuracy has been obtained. The distances between the factor score of a question statement and those of answer statements already posted are calculated. It is shown that the distance and the number of appearance may help us select users who can give appropriate answers to a question. With the consideration of categories of answer statements, users who specialize in certain categories could be regarded to give more appropriate answers.