Fora: Leveraging the Power of Internet Communities for Question Answering

This paper introduces a system for searching question answer pairs automatically extracted from the discussions in internet communities. The system, named Fora, aggregates discussions from multiple forums and newsgroups in the same domain, automatically extracts question answer pairs from the data, and provides searches of the question answer pairs. The system also ofiers expert search, query suggestion, page search, and other features. This paper explains the main features and technologies of Fora. It describes how the system extracts and ranks question answer pairs.