Leading Users Detecting Model in Professional Community Question Answering Services

Community question answering (CQA) services provide platforms for increasing number of users to seek for help and exchange ideas in recent years. As a professional community, Quora is quite different from other traditional CQA websites, such as Baidu Zhidao and Yahoo! Answers. As users´ social statuses play a more important role, besides just raising questions and finding a proper answer which the asker is satisfied with, people are inclined to have more discussions about the question, corresponding answers and related topics. Due to the spirit of wiki, people, especially some leading users work hard together to make the community a knowledge base of high quality, which in turn attracts more people to take part in this job. Thus, in this study, we focus on detecting leading users within a specific topic area of professional CQA services. A leading capacity model is utilized and three major criteria, which are authority, activity and influence, are taken into consideration. Then, an improved Borda count model is proposed to make a collective decision. Experimental results show effectiveness of the proposed method for finding leading users.