Research Issues In Community Based Question Answering

Community based Question Answering (CQA) services are defined as dedicated platforms for users to respond to other users’ questions, resulting in the building of a community where users share and interactively give ratings to questions and answers (Liu et al., 2008). CQA services are emerging as a valuable information resource that is rich not only in the expertise of the user community but also their interactions and insights. However, scholarly inquiries have yet to dovetail into a composite research stream where techniques gleaned from various research domains could be exploited for harnessing the information richness in CQA services. This paper explores the CQA domain by first understanding the service and its modules and then exploring previous studies that was conducted in this domain. This paper then compares a CQA service with traditional question answering (QA) systems to identify possible research challenges that need to be focused. This paper also identifies two nontrivial research issues that are prominent in this domain and proposes various recommendations for addressing them in future.