Predicting Web Searcher Satisfaction with Existing Community-Based Answers
Predicting Web Searcher Satisfaction with Existing Community-based Answers Qiaoling Liu§, Eugene Agichtein§, Gideon Dror†, Evgeniy Gabrilovich‡, Yoelle Maarek†, Dan Pelleg†, Idan Szpektor†, §Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA †Yahoo! Research, Haifa, Israel ‡Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA {qliu26, eugene}@mathcs.emory.edu, {gideondr, gabr, yoelle, dpelleg, idan}@yahoo-inc.com ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Community-based Question Answering (CQA) sites, such “Just because Google exists doesn’t mean you should as Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Knows, Naver, and Quora, have stop asking people things.” – Alexia Tsotsis [35] been rapidly growing in popularity. The resulting archives Community-based Question Answering (CQA) sites, such of posted answers to questions, in Yahoo! Answers alone, as Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Knows, and Naver Ji-Sik-In, as already exceed in size 1 billion, and are aggressively indexed well as more social-oriented newcomers such as Vark and by web search engines. In fact, a large number of search Quora, have gained substantial popularity over the recent engine users benefit from these archives, by finding existing years, effectively filling a niche left by the mainstream Web answers that address their own queries. This scenario poses search engines. People around the globe resort to commu- new challenges and opportunities for both search engines nity help for a variety of reasons, from lack of proficiency in and CQA sites. To this end, we formulate a new problem of Web search to seeking an answer “with a human touch”. Al- predicting the satisfaction of web searchers with CQA an- though some of these sites allow for monetary payments in swers.
[Show full text]