Expertise Analysis in a Question Answer Portal for Author Ranking

An online question answering (QA) portal provides users a way to socialize and help each other to solve problems. The majority of the online question answer systems use user-feedback to rank userspsila answers. This way of ranking is inefficient as it involves ongoing efforts by the users and is subjective. Currently researchers have utilized link analysis of user interactions for this task. However, this is not accurate in some circumstances. A detailed structural analysis of an online QA portal is conducted in this paper. A novel approach based on userspsila reputation reflecting the usage patterns is proposed to rank and recommend the user answers. The method is compared with a popular link topology analysis method, HITS. The result of the proposed method is promising.