Date of Award:

8-2015

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Computer Science

Committee Chair(s)

Kyumin Lee

Committee

Kyumin Lee

Committee

Nick Flann

Committee

Tung Nguyen

Abstract

Question and answering sites are useful in sharing the knowledge by answering questions. It is a medium of sharing knowledge. Quora is the fastest emerging effective Q&A site, which is the best source of knowledge. Here you can ask a question, and get help in getting answers from people with firsthand experience, and blog about what you know. In this paper, we are investigating and identifying potential experts who are providing the best solutions to the questioner needs. We have considered several techniques in identifying user as an expert or non-expert. We have targeted the most followed topics in Quora and finally came up with five topics: Mathematics, Politics, Technology, Sports and Business. We then crawled the user profiles who are following these topics. Each topic dataset has many special features. Our research indicates that experts are quite different from normal users and tend to produce high quality answers to as many questions as possible to gain their reputation. After evaluation, we got a limited number of experts who have potential expertise in specific fields, achieving up to 97% accuracy and 0.987 AUC.

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