RANKuser : A folksonomy and user profile based algorithm to identify experts in Community Question Answering sites

Purpose Recently, with a high volume of users and user’s content in Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, the quality of answers provided by users has raised a big concern. Finding the expert users can be a method to address this problem, which aims to find the suitable users (answerers) who can provide high-quality relevant answers. The purpose of this paper is to find the expert users for the newly posted questions of the CQA sites. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a new algorithm, RANKuser, is proposed for identifying the expert users of CQA sites. The proposed RANKuser algorithm consists of three major stages. In the first stage, folksonomy relation between users, tags, and queries is established. User profile attributes, namely, reputation, tags, and badges, are also considered in folksonomy. In the second stage, expertise scores of the user are calculated based on reputation, badges, and tags. Finally, in the third stage, the expert users are identified by extracting top N users based on expertise score. Findings In this work, with the help of proposed ranking algorithm, expert users are identified for newly posted questions. In this paper, comparison of proposed user ranking algorithm (RANKuser) is also performed with other existing ranking algorithms, namely, ML-KNN, rankSVM, LDA, STM CQARank, and EV-based model using performance parameters such as hamming loss, accuracy, average precision, one error, F -measure, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. The proposed ranking method is also compared to the original ranking of CQA sites using the paired t -test. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RANKuser algorithm in comparison with the existing ranking algorithms. Originality/value This paper proposes and implements a new algorithm for expert user identification in CQA sites. By utilizing the folksonomy in CQA sites and information of user profile, this algorithm identifies the experts.