A study on influential features for predicting best answers in community question-answering forums

Abstract

The knowledge provided by user communities in question-answering (QA) forums is a highly valuable source of information for satisfying user information needs. However, finding the best answer for a posted question can be challenging. User-generated content in forums can be of unequal quality given the free nature of natural language and the varied levels of user expertise. Answers to a question posted in a forum are compiled in a discussion thread, concentrating also posterior activity such as comments and votes. There are usually multiple reasons why an answer successfully fulfills a certain information need and gets accepted as the best answer among a (possibly) high number of answers. In this work, we study the influence that different aspects of answers have on the prediction of the best answers in a QA forum. We collected the discussion threads of a real-world forum concerning computer programming, and we evaluated different features for representing the answers and the context in which they appear in a thread. Multiple classification models were used to compare the performance of the different features, finding that readability is one of the most important factors for detecting the best answers. The goal of this study is to shed some light on the reasons why answers are more likely to receive more votes and be selected as the best answer for a posted question. Such knowledge enables users to enhance their answers which leads, in turn, to an improvement in the overall quality of the content produced in a platform.