Method of introducing appropriate respondents to questions at question-and-answer sites

This paper proposes a method for selecting respondents who can give an appropriate answer to a question, in order to eliminate mismatches between the questioners and respondents at question-and-answer sites. The possibility of detecting respondents capable of appropriately answering a newly posted question is examined and confirmed. Based on this, the proposed method uses the number of appearances of each respondent and scores them based on the distance between the factor scores of a question and previously posted answers. Impressions of statements were obtained for nine factors. Factor scores were estimated using multiple regression on the feature values of the statements. This method was evaluated by experiments that compared its precision and recall with those of methods based on average scores and distances. It was shown that the proposed method outperforms these other methods. It is also shown that, for a given question, the proposed method can successfully select those respondents who are more appropriate than around average.