Improvement of Obtaining Potential Appropriate Respondents to Questions at Q&A Sites by Considering Categories of Answer Statements

In order to eliminate mismatches between the questioners and respondents at Question and Answer sites, this paper proposes a method of selecting respondents who can appropriately answer a question with the consideration of categories of answer statements. The proposed method uses the number of appearance of respondents and the score based on the distance between the factor scores of a question and an answer already posted. It has experimentally been evaluated by comparing it with the methods based on average scores and distances through precision and recall. There is room for improvement in obtaining precision by considering categories of answer statements. Therefore, finding respondents who can properly answer a newly posted question of the same category is investigated. As a result, considering categories of answer statements leads to the improvement of precision.