Hierarchical Attentional Factorization Machines for Expert Recommendation in Community Question Answering

The most challenging task of Community Question Answering (CQA) is to provide high-quality answers to users’ questions. Currently, a variety of expert recommendation methods have been proposed and greatly improved the effective matching between questions and potential good answerers. However, the performance of existing methods can be adversely affected by many common factors such as data sparsity and noise problem, which cause less precise user modeling. Moreover, existing methods often model user-question interactions through simple ways, failing to capture the multiple scale interactions of question and answerers, which make it difficult to find answerers who are able to provide the best answers. In this paper, we propose an attention-based variant of Factorization Machines (FM) called Hierarchical Attentional Factorization Machines (HaFMRank) for answerer recommendation in CQA, which not only models the interactions between pairs of individual features but emphasizes the roles of crucial features and pairwise interactions. Specifically, we introduce the within-field attention layer to capture the inner structure of features belonging to the same field, while a feature-interaction attention layer is adopted to examine the importance of each pairwise interaction. A pre-training procedure is designed to generate latent FM feature embedding that encode question context and user history into the training process of HaFMRank. The performance of the proposed HaFMRank is evaluated by using real-world datasets of Stack Exchange and experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in best answerer recommendation.