Paper Info
Title
An empirical analysis of a network of expertise
Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the network of expertise constructed from the interactions of users on the online question-answering (QA) community of Stack Overflow. This community was built with the intention of helping users with their programming tasks and, thus, questions are expected to be highly factual. This also indicates that the answers one provides may be highly indicative of one's level of expertise on the subject matter. Therefore, our main concern is how to model and characterize the user's expertise based on the constructed network and its centrality measures. We used the user's reputation established on Stack Overflow as a direct proxy to their expertise. We further made use of linear models and principal component analysis for the purpose. We found out that the current reputation system does a decent job at representing the user's expertise and that focus matters when answering factual questions. However, our model was not able to capture the other larger half of reputation which is specifically designed to reflect a user's trustworthiness besides their expertise. Along the way, we also discovered facts that have been known in earlier studies of the other/same QA communities such as the power-law degree distribution of the network and the generalized reciprocity pattern among its users.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2492517.2500293
ASONAM
Keywords
Field
DocType
focus matter,direct proxy,empirical analysis,factual question,decent job,qa community,linear model,centrality measure,earlier study,current reputation system,stack overflow,fuzzy classification,web mining,principal component analysis
Proxy (climate),Data mining,Web mining,Reputation system,Linear model,Computer science,Centrality,Reciprocity (cultural anthropology),Artificial intelligence,Degree distribution,Machine learning,Reputation
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
8
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Truc Viet Le1104.08
Minh Thap Nguyen220.74