Method of Obtaining Appropriate Respondents to Questions at Q&A Sites

Abstract

This paper proposes a method of selecting respondents who can appropriately answer a question to eliminate mismatches between the questioners and respondents at Question and Answer sites. The proposed method uses the number of appearance of respondents and the score based on the distance between the factor scores of a question and an answer already posted. Nine factors of impressions for statements have experimentally been obtained. Factor scores have been estimated through multiple regression. The possibility of detecting respondents capable of appropriately answering a newly posted question has been examined. The proposed method is based on this observation. It is experimentally evaluated by comparing it with the methods based on average scores and distances through precision and recall. It is shown that the proposed method outperforms others. It is also shown that the proposed method could successfully select the respondents that are more than almost averagely appropriate to a question.