Abstract
AbstractAn online community is a virtual community where people can express their opinions and their knowledge freely. There are a great deal of information in online communities, however there is no way to determine its authenticity. Thus the knowledge which has been shared in online communities is not reliable. By determining expertise level of users and finding experts in online communities the accuracy of posted comments can be evaluated.In this study, a hybrid method for expert finding in online communities is presented which is based on content analysis and social network analysis. The content analysis is based on concept map and the social network analysis is based on PageRank algorithm. To evaluate the proposed method java online community was selected and then correlation between our results and scores prepared by java online community was calculated. Based on obtained results Spearman correlation for 11 subcategories of java online community using this method is 0.904, which is highly an acceptable value.
Highlights
Online communities due to their unique features such as ease of access have become one of the main sources for resolving problems
A hybrid method for expert finding in online communities is presented; in our method content analysis is performed by analyzing concept map and social network analysis is based on PageRank algorithm
Spearman correlation between our results and scores prepared by java online community was calculated separately for the 11 subsections and the entire java online community, the overall correlation was calculated by taking the average of these correlations
Summary
Online communities due to their unique features such as ease of access have become one of the main sources for resolving problems. A hybrid method for expert finding in online communities is presented; in our method content analysis is performed by analyzing concept map and social network analysis is based on PageRank algorithm. In content analysis for first time till we have used from similarity between question and answer as a factor for evaluating user's expertise in online communities and in social network analysis we have designed a customized PageRank algorithm which works very good even alone. Expert Finder Systems (EFS’s) are considered as part of the CSCW systems (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) They are designed to find people with special expertise or knowledge in online communities, who have ability to respond to a particular question. In [28] a recommender system mechanism is provided for improving knowledge sharing in online forums Another example of utilizing expert finding systems is to solve complex problems in organizations. The concept map is a weighted graph where all edges weight
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