Personalized question routing via heterogeneous network embedding

Abstract

Question Routing (QR) on Community-based Question Answering (CQA) websites aims at recommending answerers that have high probabilities of providing the “accepted answers” to new questions. The existing question routing algorithms simply predict the ranking of users based on query content. As a consequence, the question raiser information is ignored. On the other hand, they lack learnable scoring functions to explicitly compute ranking scores. To tackle these challenges, we propose NeRank that (1) jointly learns representations of question content, question raiser, and question answerers by a heterogeneous information network embedding algorithm and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. The embeddings of the three types of entities are unified in the same latent space, and (2) conducts question routing for personalized queries, i.e., queries with two entities (question content, question raiser), by a convolutional scoring function taking the learned embeddings of all three types of entities as input. Using the scores, NeRank routes new questions to high-ranking answerers that are skillfulness in the question domain and have similar backgrounds to the question raiser. Experimental results show that NeRank significantly outperforms competitive baseline question routing models that ignore the raiser information in three ranking metrics. In addition, NeRank is convergeable in several thousand iterations and insensitive to parameter changes, which prove its effectiveness, scalability, and robustness.