VIZ-Wiki: Generating Visual Summaries to Factoid Threads in Community Question Answering Services

Tanya Chowdhury, Aashay Mittal, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Abstract: In this demo, we present VIZ-Wiki, a browser extension which generates an overview of summarizable threads in Question Answering forums. It reduces a user's effort to go through lengthy text-based, sarcastic and highly critiqued answers. Our tool can be used to collect community opinion from popular discussion sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Reddit etc. as well as topic-centric ones such as Askubuntu, Stackoverflow. We rely on textual information of these forums to extract insightful summaries for a reader. VIZ-Wiki provides users a pie-graph view marking popular choices when such a question link is raised. A button guides them to detailed statistics and relevant list of answers. It further highlights sentences relevant to an answer choice in the text. VIZ-Wiki deals with answers contradicted by other users, prioritizes highly-recommended ones and avoids sarcasm. We test our model on the factoid questions dataset of Yahoo! Answers and obtain a macro precision of 0.6 on displayed answers and a macro recall of 0.69, beating the baseline significantly. To the best of our knowledge, VIZ-Wiki is the first attempt to visualize answers for questions in community question answering services. In the spirit of reproducibility, we have released the code and a demonstration video public at \urlhttp://goo.gl/cyx3EF and \urlhttps://youtu.be/XNmRa_jtmC8 respectively