Answering Twitter Questions

Abstract

Previous studies on the practice of asking questions on social networking sites have shown that most questions remain unanswered and that most of the replies, if any, are only from members of the questioner's neighborhood. In this paper, we specifically consider the challenging task of solving a question posted on Twitter. As outlined in previous work related to community Q\&A, we believe that question-answering is a collaborative process and that the relevant answer to a question post is an aggregation of answer nuggets posted by a group of relevant users. Thus, the problem of identifying the relevant answer turns into the problem of identifying the right group of users who would provide useful answers and would possibly be willing to collaborate together in the long-term. Accordingly, we present a novel method, called CRAQ, that is built on the collaboration paradigm and formulated as a group entropy optimization problem. To optimize the quality of the group, an information gain measure is used to select the most likely ``informative" users according to topical and collaboration likelihood predictive features. Crowd-based experiments performed on two crisis-related Twitter datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our collaborative-based answering approach.