Proposal of an Economical and Feasible Distributed SOS System for Mobile Users to Generate High Quality Answers

Recently, emerging research efforts have been focused on question and answer (Q&A) systems based on social networks. The social-based Q&A systems can answer non-factual questions, which cannot be easily resolved by web search engines. These systems either rely on a centralized server for identifying friends based on social information or broadcast a user’s questions to all of its friends. Mobile Q&A systems, where mobile nodes access the Q&A systems through Internet, are very promising considering the rapid increase of mobile users and the convenience of practical use. However, such systems cannot directly use the previous centralized methods or broadcasting methods, which generate high cost of mobile Internet access, node overload, and high server bandwidth cost with the tremendous number of mobile users. We propose a distributed Social-based mobile Q&A System (SOS) with low overhead and system cost as well as quick response to question askers. SOS enables mobile users to forward questions to potential answerers in their friend lists in a decentralized manner for a number of hops before resorting to the server. It leverages lightweight knowledge engineering techniques to accurately identify friends who are able to and willing to answer questions, thus reducing the search and computation costs of mobile nodes. The trace-driven simulation results show that SOS can achieve a high query precision and recall rate, a short response latency and low overhead. We have also deployed a pilot version of SOS for use in a small group in our Institute. The feedback from the users shows that SOS can provide high-quality answers. Keywords: People Helping One Another Know Stuff (PHOAKS); Social Sim Rank (SSR); Social Page Rank (SPR); Social Sim Rank(SSR); Social-based mobile QA Profile-Based Personalization