It Takes a Team to Triumph: Collaborative Expert Finding in Community QA Networks

Abstract

The increasing complexity and multidisciplinary nature of queries on Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms have rendered the traditional model of individual expert response inadequate. This paper tackles the challenge of identifying a group of experts whose combined expertise can address such complex inquiries collaboratively, leading to more accepted answers. Our approach jointly learns topological and textual information extracted from the CQA environment in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on several real-life datasets indicate that our approach improves the quality of expert ranks on average 4.6% and 7.1% in terms of NDCG and MAP, respectively, compared to the best baseline. The results also reveal that groups formed by our approach are more collaborative and on average 61.6% of members recommended by our approach are among the true answerers of questions which is around 6.1 times improvement compared to the baselines.