Ranking community answers via analogical reasoning

Xudong Tu, Xin-Jing Wang, Dan Feng, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Due to the lexical gap between questions and answers, automatically detecting right answers becomes very challenging for community question-answering sites. In this paper, we propose an analogical reasoning-based method. It treats questions and answers as relational data and ranks an answer by measuring the analogy of its link to a query with the links embedded in previous relevant knowledge; the answer that links in the most analogous way to the new question is assumed to be the best answer. We based our experiments on 29.8 million Yahoo!Answer question-answer threads and showed the effectiveness of the approach.