Using CQA History to Improve Q&A Experience

Social query is the practice of sharing questions through collaborative environments. In order to receive help, askers usually broadcast their request to the entire community. However, the prerequisite to receive help is to have the problem noticed by someone able and available to answer. Some works found a correlation between the characteristics of the questions and the outcome of receiving or not an answer. These findings suggest that there are some characteristics that are more likely to attract the attention of helpers. Our proposal is to analyse CQA history to identify the similar characteristics of previously asked questions that were answered. We believe that adding these characteristics in new questions will impact the receiving of answers. We evaluate our proposal using real world data and a real world experiment. Our results indicate that including “good characteristics” in the question reduce time for first response and improve answer quality.