Dynamic user modeling for expert recommendation in community question answering

Abstract

Community Question Answering (CQA) websites has become an important channel for people to acquire knowledge. In CQA, one key issue is to recommend users with high expertise and willingness to answer the given questions, i.e., expert recommendation. However, a lot of existing methods consider the expert recommendation problem in a static context, ignoring that the real-world CQA websites are dynamic, with users’ interest and expertise changing over time. Although some methods that utilize time information have been proposed, their performance improvement can be limited due to fact that they fail they fail to consider the dynamic change of both user interests and expertise. To solve these problems, we propose a deep learning based framework for expert recommendation to exploit user interest and expertise in a dynamic environment. For user interest, we leverage Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to model user’s short-term interest so as to capture the dynamic change of users’ interests. For user expertise, we design user expertise network, which leverages feedback on users’ historical behavior to estimate their expertise on new question. We propose two methods in user expertise network according to whether the dynamic property of expertise is considered. The experimental results on a large-scale dataset from a real-world CQA site demonstrate the superior performance of our method.