Title:	EVALUATION OF ANSWER QUALITY IN CQA WEBSITES
Author(s):	Alton Y.K Chua, Radhika Shenoy Balkunje
ISBN:	978-972-8939-72-4
Editors:	Piet Kommers, Pedro Isaías and Nik Bessis
Year:	2012
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	CQA websites, answer quality, content value, cognitive value, socio-emotional value, answer speed
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	49
Last Page:	56
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Enabled by community-based natural language question answering, CQA websites have been drawing increasing number of users in the recent years. Researchers have attempted to study the impact of CQAs on the conventional concepts of information creation, acquisition and dissemination. However, limited efforts seem to be expended in assessing the quality of answers that these websites generate. Moreover, with the profusion of user-generated content, answer quality is paramount to sustain the real value of knowledge thriving in the CQAs. This paper therefore seeks to address the aforementioned concern by performing an evaluation of answer quality in six leading CQA websites, three English and three Chinese. The English websites include Wiki Answers, Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag whereas the Chinese websites include Baidu Knows, Tencent Soso WenWen and Sina iask. The evaluation framework for answer quality consists of four dimensions namely, content value, cognitive value, socio-emotional value and answer speed. Specifically, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: 1.) Is there any significant difference in answer quality between English and Chinese CQA websites? 2.) Is there any significant difference in answer quality across different CQA websites? A total of 1164 answers are extracted from the six websites and submitted for analysis. The results arising from the evaluation helped answer the two research questions. One, there was a significant difference in answer quality between English and Chinese websites in terms of cognitive value and socio-emotional value. This variation may be attributed to the different cultures, norms and beliefs of Western users and Chinese users. Two, there was significant difference in answer quality across all six websites in terms of content value, cognitive value and socio-emotional value. This variation can be explained by various factors such as the differences in information and communication technologies, information management strategies, user motivation methods and question types implemented by the websites.
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