Investigating Factors Affecting Automated Question Triage for Social Reference: A Study of Adopting Decision Factors from Digital Reference

Abstract

The efficiency and quality of the social reference sites are being challenged because a large quantity of the questions have not been answered or satisfied for quite a long time. Main goal of this study is to investigate important factors that affect the performance of question triage to relevant answerers in the context of social reference. To achieve the goal, expert finding techniques were used to construct an automated question triage approach to resolve this problem. Furthermore, important factors affecting triage decisions in digital reference were first examined, and extended them to the social reference setting by investigating important factors affecting the performance of automated question triage in the social reference setting. The study was conducted using question-answer pairs collected from Ask Metafilter. For the evaluation, logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine which factors would significantly affect the performance of predicting relevant answerers to questions. The results of the current study have important implications for research and practice in automated question triage for social reference. Furthermore, the results will offer insights into designing user-participatory digital reference systems.