A machine learning-based approach to predicting success of questions on social question-answering
Erik Choi, Vanessa Kitzie, Chirag Suresh Shah · 2013
While social question-answering (SQA) services are becoming increasingly popular, there is often an issue of unsatisfactory or missing information for a question posed by an information seeker. This study creates a model to predict question failure, or a question that does not receive an answer, within the social Q&A site Yahoo! Answers. To do so, observed shared characteristics of failed questions were translated into empirical features, both textual and non-textual in nature, and measured using machine extraction methods. A classifier was then trained using these features and tested on a data set of 400 questions—half of them successful, half not—to determine the accuracy of the classifier in identifying failed questions. The results show the substantial ability of the approach to correctly identify the likelihood of success or failure of a question, resulting in a promising tool to automatically identify ill-formed questions and/or questions that are likely to fail and make suggestions on how to revise them.