HCC-Small: Understanding and Supporting Online Question-Answering Sites

Online Question-Answering Sites (Q&A sites, for short) are a new and rapidly growing piece of the community-created content landscape. From Knowledge iN in South Korea to Microsoft's Live QnA in the U.S., to Yahoo! Answers in 26 countries world-wide, users are flocking to sites where they can post questions and get answers. Yahoo! Answers alone attracts about 18 million unique visitors monthly and has accumulated over 400 million answers since its launch in 2005. Not only do these sites meet individual needs for information, the content they generate is an important source for online search and knowledge discovery. However, a casual browse through any one site reveals significant noise in the signal. Too many questions receive sarcastic or even insulting answers. Too often, it seems, users re-ask a question rather than finding value in the answers already posed.

Because the dramatic growth of Q&A sites is so recent, there has been little opportunity to empirically investigate them as a new information resource and as a new type of social space. This project examines five Q&A sites using a variety of observational and experimental methods to gain an understanding of how users interact in and with these sites while also developing tools to help users better meet their goals. Specifically, this project will: 1.) identify structures or properties in questions posed on Q&A sites that affect response characteristics such as quantity, quality, and timeliness; and explore the use of templates, critics, and bots to help question-askers obtain better responses; 2.) identify structures or properties in response threads that suggest high risk of failure; and explore the use of bots to intervene and 'rescue' derailed Q&A threads; 3.) understand the lifecycle of Q&A site participants, including their social interaction on the sites; and develop tools to help support user integration into online Q&A communities.

Given their importance as an information resource and social phenomenon, understanding online Q&A sites has intellectual merit in its own right, in addition: this work advances an important line of research on online and computer-mediated communications that has helped rhetoric and communications experts contribute to the design of more effective online communication tools. It will also be the first work to study online Q&A from both a social and an information resource perspective, giving new insight into the nature of online voluntary knowledge creation.

Broader Impacts: Online question-answering sites have become an important source of information and advice for individuals and businesses, as well as an important source of content for web search engines. By understanding these sites and developing tools to support their continued successful operation, we will help Q&A community designers understand approaches that can both promote beneficial social experiences for users and the construction of valuable community-contributed repositories of knowledge.