Expert finding in virtual learning community

Virtual learning community has become an important way for people to acquire knowledge in this Internet age. Usually, users post their questions online and wait others to review the post before any answers could be offered. Yet more than often, those who maintain domain knowledge concerning specific questions, which we will call expert, may not be able to notice these questions in time due to the tremendous amount of posts in a forum. This leads to long waiting period for questioners, and even unresolved questions. To tackle this problem, a solution based on forum expert finding is proposed in the paper. The proposed method performs analysis on existed data of forum, attempts to figure out experts in the learning community and therefore provides proactive service for users. It improves efficiency of answering process and eliminates waiting period of users.