A generalized framework of exploring category information for question retrieval in community question answer archives

Abstract

Community Question Answering (CQA) has emerged as a popular type of service where users ask and answer questions and access historical question-answer pairs. CQA archives contain very large volumes of questions organized into a hierarchy of categories. As an essential function of CQA services, question retrieval in a CQA archive aims to retrieve historical question-answer pairs that are relevant to a query question. In this paper, we present a new approach to exploiting category information of questions for improving the performance of question retrieval, and we apply the approach to existing question retrieval models, including a state-of-the-art question retrieval model. Experiments conducted on real CQA data demonstrate that the proposed techniques are capable of outperforming a variety of baseline methods significantly.