research-article

Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something

Authors:

Lada A. Adamic,

Mark S. AckermanAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web

Pages 665 - 674

https://doi.org/10.1145/1367497.1367587

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.

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https://doi.org/10.4018/JGIM.344044
Jang MKim S(2024)Key traits of top answerers on Korean Social Q&A platforms: insights into user performance and entrepreneurial potentialHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-03239-311:1Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03239-3
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Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web

April 2008

1326 pages

ISBN:9781605580852

DOI:10.1145/1367497

General Chairs:
Jinpeng Huai
Beihang University, China
,
Robin Chen
AT&T Labs, USA
,
Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Yunhao Liu
HK University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
,
Program Chairs:
Wei-Ying Ma
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Andrew Tomkins
Yahoo! Research, USA
,
Xiaodong Zhang
The Ohio State University, USA

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 April 2008

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WWW '08: The 17th International World Wide Web Conference

April 21 - 25, 2008

Beijing, China

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Jang MKim S(2024)Key traits of top answerers on Korean Social Q&A platforms: insights into user performance and entrepreneurial potentialHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-03239-311:1Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03239-3
Han DLiu YZhang FLu Y(2024)Game-theoretic private blockchain design in edge computing networksDigital Communications and Networks10.1016/j.dcan.2023.12.001Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2023.12.001
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Roy PSingh J(2024)Early prediction of promising expert users on community question answering sitesInternational Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management10.1007/s13198-024-02303-015:7(2902-2913)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
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