Shah Khusro, Aftab Alam and Shah Khalid
Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to…
Abstract
Purpose
Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites.
Design/methodology/approach
A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites.
Findings
By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed.
Practical implications
The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world.
Originality/value
The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites.
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Keywords
Adamu Garba, Shah Khalid, Irfan Ullah, Shah Khusro and Diyawu Mumin
There have been many challenges in crawling deep web by search engines due to their proprietary nature or dynamic content. Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) tries to solve…
Abstract
Purpose
There have been many challenges in crawling deep web by search engines due to their proprietary nature or dynamic content. Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) tries to solve these problems by providing a unified searchable interface to these databases. Since a DIR must search across many databases, selecting a specific database to search against the user query is challenging. The challenge can be solved if the past queries of the users are considered in selecting collections to search in combination with word embedding techniques. Combining these would aid the best performing collection selection method to speed up retrieval performance of DIR solutions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose a collection selection model based on word embedding using Word2Vec approach that learns the similarity between the current and past queries. They used the cosine and transformed cosine similarity models in computing the similarities among queries. The experiment is conducted using three standard TREC testbeds created for federated search.
Findings
The results show significant improvements over the baseline models.
Originality/value
Although the lexical matching models for collection selection using similarity based on past queries exist, to the best our knowledge, the proposed work is the first of its kind that uses word embedding for collection selection by learning from past queries.
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This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to…
Abstract
This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi's theorisation of the post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi's other work (e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship.
Tuotuo Qi, Tianmei Wang, Yanlin Ma and Xinxue Zhou
Knowledge sharing has entered the stage of knowledge payment with the typical models of paid Q&A, live session, paid subscription, course column and community service. Numerous…
Abstract
Purpose
Knowledge sharing has entered the stage of knowledge payment with the typical models of paid Q&A, live session, paid subscription, course column and community service. Numerous knowledge suppliers have begun to pour into the knowledge payment market, and users' willingness to pay for premium content has increased. However, the academic research on knowledge payment has just begun.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors searched several bibliographic databases using keywords such as “knowledge payment”, “paid Q&A”, “pay for answer”, “social Q&A”, “paywall” and “online health consultation” and selected papers from aspects of research scenes, research topics, etc. Finally, a total of 116 articles were identified for combing studies.
Findings
This study found that in the early research, scholars paid attention to the definition of knowledge payment concept and the discrimination of typical models. With the continuous enrichment of research literature, the research direction has gradually been refined into three main branches from the perspective of research objects, i.e. knowledge provider, knowledge demander and knowledge payment platform.
Originality/value
This paper focuses on discussing and sorting out the key research issues from these three research genres. Finally, the authors found out conflicting and contradictory research results and research gaps in the existing research and then put forward the urgent research topics.
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Faming Zhang, Qifan Hu and Xupeng Fang
The once failed paid-for social question and answer (SQA) service is in full swing in China. The traditional profit model, which typically relies on advertising, is abandoned in…
Abstract
Purpose
The once failed paid-for social question and answer (SQA) service is in full swing in China. The traditional profit model, which typically relies on advertising, is abandoned in this case. Instead, users have to pay for content and service. The purpose of this paper is to explore why users are willing to pay in paid-for SQA sites.
Design/methodology/approach
This study carried out 14 valid semi-structured interviews to investigate “why did they pay.” The interviewees are users of three popular paid-for SQA sites. The qualitative data were obtained from valid interviews and processed through thematic analysis.
Findings
The analysis revealed five overarching themes: paying for the answerer’s heterogeneous resource, paying for more credible answer, the cognition of the question, the price is affordable and expecting potential revenue. The five themes and their sub-themes constitute the motivation for why users would pay in paid-for SQA.
Practical implications
As a new business model for online information services, paid-for SQA sites are facing fierce competition from traditional ones. The findings not only indicate the importance of establishing a reciprocal network relationship among users, but also provide a better understanding of users’ needs and demands for paid-for SQA services. The results are helpful for paid-for SQA sites to conduct a differential competitive strategy according to the user’s paying motivation.
Originality/value
To authors’ knowledge, this is the first study, which provides primary-source data and valuable insights into users’ paying motivation in the context of new paid-for SQA sites in China.
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Lei Li, Chengzhi Zhang, Daqing He and Jia Tina Du
Through a two-stage survey, this paper examines how researchers judge the quality of answers on ResearchGate Q&A, an academic social networking site.
Abstract
Purpose
Through a two-stage survey, this paper examines how researchers judge the quality of answers on ResearchGate Q&A, an academic social networking site.
Design/methodology/approach
In the first-stage survey, 15 researchers from Library and Information Science (LIS) judged the quality of 157 answers to 15 questions and reported the criteria that they had used. The content of their reports was analyzed, and the results were merged with relevant criteria from the literature to form the second-stage survey questionnaire. This questionnaire was then completed by researchers recognized as accomplished at identifying high-quality LIS answers on ResearchGate Q&A.
Findings
Most of the identified quality criteria for academic answers—such as relevance, completeness, and verifiability—have previously been found applicable to generic answers. The authors also found other criteria, such as comprehensiveness, the answerer's scholarship, and value-added. Providing opinions was found to be the most important criterion, followed by completeness and value-added.
Originality/value
The findings here show the importance of studying the quality of answers on academic social Q&A platforms and reveal unique considerations for the design of such systems.
Details
Keywords
Arshad Ahmad, Chong Feng, Shi Ge and Abdallah Yousif
Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the…
Abstract
Purpose
Software developers extensively use stack overflow (SO) for knowledge sharing on software development. Thus, software engineering researchers have started mining the structured/unstructured data present in certain software repositories including the Q&A software developer community SO, with the aim to improve software development. The purpose of this paper is show that how academics/practitioners can get benefit from the valuable user-generated content shared on various online social networks, specifically from Q&A community SO for software development.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive literature review was conducted and 166 research papers on SO were categorized about software development from the inception of SO till June 2016.
Findings
Most of the studies revolve around a limited number of software development tasks; approximately 70 percent of the papers used millions of posts data, applied basic machine learning methods, and conducted investigations semi-automatically and quantitative studies. Thus, future research should focus on the overcoming existing identified challenges and gaps.
Practical implications
The work on SO is classified into two main categories; “SO design and usage” and “SO content applications.” These categories not only give insights to Q&A forum providers about the shortcomings in design and usage of such forums but also provide ways to overcome them in future. It also enables software developers to exploit such forums for the identified under-utilized tasks of software development.
Originality/value
The study is the first of its kind to explore the work on SO about software development and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, design/usage shortcomings of Q&A sites, and future research challenges.