Who have got answers? Growing the pool of answerers in a smart enterprise social QA system

On top of an enterprise social platform, we are building a smart social QA system that automatically routes questions to suitable employees who are willing, able, and ready to provide answers. Due to a lack of social QA history (training data) to start with, in this paper, we present an optimization- based approach that recommends both active (seed) and inactive (prospect) answerers for a given question. Our approach includes three parts. First, it uses a predictive model to find top-ranked seed answerers by their fitness, including their ability and willingness, to answer a question. Second, it uses distance metric learning to discover prospects most similar to the seeds identified in the first step. Third, it uses a constraint-based approach to balance the selection of both seeds and prospects identified in the first two steps. As a result, not only does our solution route questions to top-matched active users, but it also engages inactive users to grow the pool of answerers. Our real-world experiments that routed 114 questions to 684 people identified from 400,000+ employees included 641 prospects (93.7%) and achieved about 70% answering rate with 83% of answers received a lot/full confidence. © 2014 ACM.