ColdRoute: Effective Routing of Cold Questions in Stack Exchange Sites

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Abstract Routing questions in Community Question Answer services (CQAs) such as Stack Exchange sites is a well-studied problem. Yet, cold-start - a phenomena observed when a new question is posted is not well addressed by existing approaches. Additionally, cold questions posted by new askers present significant challenges to state-of-the-art approaches. We propose ColdRoute to address these challenges. ColdRoute is able to handle the task of routing cold questions posted by new or existing askers to matching experts. Specifically, we use Factorization Machines on the one-hot encoding of critical features such as question tags and compare our approach to well-studied techniques such as CQARank and semantic matching (LDA, BoW, and Doc2Vec). Using data from eight stack exchange sites, we are able to improve upon the routing metrics (Precision@1, Accuracy, MRR) over the state-of-the-art models such as semantic matching by 159.5%,31.84%, Keywords question routing · expert finding · cold-start problem · question answering services 1 Introduction Nowadays, the Community-based question answering sites (CQAs) such as Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange Sites, and Quora, which enable people to post questions and answers in various domains [Yang et al., 2013] have accumulated millions Aniket Chakrabarti Microsoft (work done while at The Ohio State University) Email: chakrabarti.14@osu.edu 2 Jiankai Sun et al. One important task in CQAs is to make recommendations for new questions (routing questions), that fall in three scenarios: 1) find experts. In this paper, we focus on the problem of expert finding [Xu et al., 2012,Zhao et al., 2013,Yang et al., 2013, Fang et al., 2016,Zhao et al., 2016,Zhao et al., 2017], which is to choose the right experts for answering questions posted by users in Stack Exchange, which is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites containing topics in various fields. Each Stack Exchange site covers a specific topic. Usually there are two types of questions in CQAs - resolved (questions with answers) and newly posted questions (questions that have not received any answers).