QuestionHolic: Hot topic discovery and trend analysis in community question answering systems

Abstract

Community question answering (CQA) has recently become a popular social media where users can post questions on any topic of interest and get answers from enthusiasts. The variation of topics in questions and answers indicate the change of users’ interests over time. It can help users focus on the most popular products or events and track their changes by exploiting hot topics and analyzing the trend of a specific topic. In this paper, we present a hot topic detection and trend analysis system to capture hot topics in a CQA system and track their evolutions over time. Our system consists of hot term extraction, question clustering and trend analysis. Experimental results using datasets from Yahoo! Answers show that our system can discover meaningful hot topics. We also show that the evolution of topics over time can be accurately exploited by trend graphing.