Exploiting user profile information for answer ranking in cQA.

Answer ranking is very important for cQA services due to the high variance in the quality of answers. Most existing works in this area focus on using various features or employing machine learning techniques to address this problem. Only a few of them noticed and involved user profile information in this particular task. In this work, we assume the close relationship between user profile information and the quality of their answers under the ground truth that user information records the user behaviors and histories as a summary. Thus, we exploited the effectiveness of three categories of user profile information, i.e. engagement-related, authority-related and level-related, on answer ranking in cQA. Different from previous work, we only employed the information which is easy to extract without any limitations, such as user privacy. Experimental results on Yahoo! Answers manner questions showed that our system by using the user profile information achieved comparable or even better results over the state-of-the-art baseline system. Moreover, we found that the picture existence of a user in cQA community contributed more than other information in the answer ranking task.