Question retrieval with high quality answers in community question answering

This paper studies the problem of question retrieval in community question answering (CQA). To bridge lexical gaps in questions, which is regarded as the biggest challenge in retrieval, state-of-the-art methods learn translation models using answers under an assumption that they are parallel texts. In practice, however, questions and answers are far from “parallel”. Indeed, they are heterogeneous for both the literal level and user behaviors. There are a particularly large number of low quality answers, to which the performance of translation models is vulnerable. To address these problems, we propose a supervised question-answer topic modeling approach. The approach assumes that questions and answers share some common latent topics and are generated in a “question language” and “answer language” respectively following the topics. The topics also determine an answer quality signal. Compared with translation models, our approach not only comprehensively models user behaviors on CQA portals, but also highlights the instinctive heterogeneity of questions and answers. More importantly, it takes answer quality into account and performs robustly against noise in answers. With the topic modeling approach, we propose a topic-based language model, which matches questions not only on a term level but also on a topic level. We conducted experiments on large scale data from Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Knows. Experimental results show that the proposed model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art retrieval models in CQA.