Hits on question answer portals: exploration of link analysis for author ranking

Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are growing in popularity. However, despite the increased popularity, the quality of answers is uneven, and while some users usually provide good answers, many others often provide bad answers. Hence, estimating the authority, or the expected quality of users, is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking and to incentive mechanism design. We adapt a powerful link analysis methodology from the web domain as a first step towards estimating authority in Question Answer portals. Our experimental results over more than 3 million answers from Yahoo! Answers are promising, and warrant further exploration along the lines outlined in this poster.