Finding the right facts in the crowd: factoid question answering over social media

Community Question Answering has emerged as a popular and effective paradigm for a wide range of information needs. For example, to find out an obscure piece of trivia, it is now possible and even very effective to post a question on a popular community QA site such as Yahoo! Answers, and to rely on other users to provide answers, often within minutes. The importance of such community QA sites is magnified as they create archives of millions of questions and hundreds of millions of answers, many of which are invaluable for the information needs of other searchers. However, to make this immense body of knowledge accessible, effective answer retrieval is required. In particular, as any user can contribute an answer to a question, the majority of the content reflects personal, often unsubstantiated opinions. A ranking that combines both relevance and quality is required to make such archives usable for factual information retrieval. This task is challenging, as the structure and the cont...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Jiang Bian, Yandong Liu, Eugene Agichtein, Hongyuan Zha
• Keywords: Effective Answer Retrieval, Factual Information Retrieval, Internet Technology, QA Archives Differ, WWW 2008