Predicting Long-Term Impact of CQA Posts: A Comprehensive Viewpoint
Oct 7, 2014 1480 views 
Community Question Answering (CQA) sites have become valuable platforms to create, share, and seek a massive volume of human knowledge. How can we spot an insightful question that would inspire massive further discussions in CQA sites? How can we detect a valuable answer that benefits many users? The long-term impact (e.g., the size of the population a post benefits) of a question/answer post is the key quantity to answer these questions. In this paper, we aim to predict the long-term impact of questions/answers shortly after they are posted in the CQA sites. In particular, we propose a family of algorithms for the prediction problem by modeling three key aspects, i.e., non-linearity, question/answer coupling, and dynamics. We analyze our algorithms in terms of optimality, correctness, and complexity. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on two real CQA data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.