HCC: Small: Experiments in Community Q&A

Online community question-and-answer systems such as Yahoo! Answers provide a venue where people can pose questions, provide answers and browse and comment on both. Such sites are now a central part of online interaction on a wide range of sites, including specialized sites for software development, tax preparation, and product support. In this projects, the PIs will experimentally answer a set of causal questions drawn from diverse research literatures about how to improve the performance of Q&A systems, specifically what leads people to provide good quality answers (and questions), how to route questions so they are answered by the best possible member, how referrals and profiles affect questions and answers, and to what extent different kinds of incentives affect behavior on the site.

The proposed research is important because online question and answer systems have become an important source of information and advice for individuals and businesses, an important and economical way for businesses to help their customers support each other, as well as an important source of content for web search engines. By understanding these systems, building models of usage and testing designs to support their improved operation, the project will help systems designers understand approaches that can promote beneficial social experiences for users and that can inform the construction of valuable community-contributed repositories of knowledge. Additional benefits include the release of data sets for other researchers and the training of student researchers.