Time-aware hybrid expertise retrieval system in community question answering services

摘要

This paper introduces a time-aware hybrid expertise retrieval (TaHER) system for community question answering (CQA) services. It comprises of a text-based part and a network-based part. The text-based part makes use of the textual and the temporal information associated with questions and answers. Moreover, it assesses the recent interests and the activities of answerers. For a given question, it determines the knowledge of each answerer and identify active answerers with adequate knowledge. The network-based part is composed of several period-dependent networks. It uses the relationships among the answerers along with temporal information. Next, it applies a link analysis technique on the networks to determine the time-aware authority of each answerer in the community. We, nonetheless, propose a fusion strategy for combining the offshoots of these two parts. Using 5 performance measures, TaHER system is compared with 20 state-of-the-art algorithms on 4 real-world datasets. According to our experiments, in 93.75% (375 out of 400) cases, the proposed approach outperforms the comparing approaches. We also experimentally validate the importance of each assumption used by us.