Social information seeking
Encyclopedia
Social information seeking (SIS) is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people seeking and sharing information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, AnswerBag, and WikiAnswers. as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Highly related topics involve traditional and virtual reference
services, information retrieval
, information extraction
, and knowledge representation
.
. cQA sites make their content – questions and associated answers submitted on the site – available on the open web, and indexable by search engines, thus enabling web users to find answers provided for previously asked questions in response to new queries.
The popularity of such sites have been increasing dramatically for the past several years. Major sites that provide a general platform for questions of all types include Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag and Quora. While other sites that focus on particular fields include StackOverflow (computing) and Healthysparx (health).
Social Q&A or cQA, according to Shah et al., consists of three components: a mechanism for users to submit questions in natural language, a venue for users to submit answers to questions, and a community built around this exchange. Viewed in that light, online communities have performed a question answering function perhaps since the advent of Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems, so in one sense cQA is nothing new. Websites dedicated to cQA, however, have emerged on the web only within the past few years: the first cQA site was the Korean Naver Knowledge iN, launched in 2002, while the first English-language CQA site was Answerbag, launched in April 2003. Despite this short history, however, cQA has already attracted a great deal of attention from researchers investigating information seeking behaviors , selection of resources , social annotations , user motivations , comparisons with other types of question answering services , and a range of other information-related behaviors.
Shah et al. provide a detailed research agenda for social Q&A.
Virtual reference
Virtual reference is the remote, computer-mediated delivery of reference information provided by library professionals to users who cannot access or do not want face-to-face communication. Virtual reference service is most often an extension of a library's existing reference service program...
services, information retrieval
Information retrieval
Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
, information extraction
Information extraction
Information extraction is a type of information retrieval whose goal is to automatically extract structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents. In most of the cases this activity concerns processing human language texts by means of natural language...
, and knowledge representation
Knowledge representation
Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
.
Background
Social information seeking is often materialized in online question-answering (QA) websites, which are driven by a community. Such QA sites have emerged in the past few years as an enormous market, so to speak, for the fulfillment of information needs. Estimates of the volume of questions answered are difficult to come by, but it is likely that the number of questions answered on social/community QA (cQA) sites far exceeds the number of questions answered by library reference services , which until recently were one of the few institutional sources for such question answeringQuestion answering
In information retrieval and natural language processing , question answering is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language...
. cQA sites make their content – questions and associated answers submitted on the site – available on the open web, and indexable by search engines, thus enabling web users to find answers provided for previously asked questions in response to new queries.
The popularity of such sites have been increasing dramatically for the past several years. Major sites that provide a general platform for questions of all types include Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag and Quora. While other sites that focus on particular fields include StackOverflow (computing) and Healthysparx (health).
Social Q&A or cQA, according to Shah et al., consists of three components: a mechanism for users to submit questions in natural language, a venue for users to submit answers to questions, and a community built around this exchange. Viewed in that light, online communities have performed a question answering function perhaps since the advent of Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems, so in one sense cQA is nothing new. Websites dedicated to cQA, however, have emerged on the web only within the past few years: the first cQA site was the Korean Naver Knowledge iN, launched in 2002, while the first English-language CQA site was Answerbag, launched in April 2003. Despite this short history, however, cQA has already attracted a great deal of attention from researchers investigating information seeking behaviors , selection of resources , social annotations , user motivations , comparisons with other types of question answering services , and a range of other information-related behaviors.
Research questions
Some of the interesting and important research questions in this area include:- What causes people to be involved in social Q&A?
- What is the motivation of people who participate in social Q&A?
- Why do questioners choose social Q&A as a source to find information?
- Why do they ask questions online to people whose background or expertise may be unverified?
- Why do they choose social Q&A over other sources to look for information?
- What do they expect from answers given by anonymous people on the Web?
- Why are the answerers willing to share information and knowledge with anonymous people, for free?
- Why do they spend time and effort to find information and help others online? Why are they willing to expose their personal stories to people and inform others with their experiences?
Shah et al. provide a detailed research agenda for social Q&A.