42
The Answer to Anything
Tom Arnoldussen
University of Amsterdam Diederik Beker
tom.arnoldussen@gmail.com University of Amsterdam
diederik.beker@live.nl
Didi de Hooge
University of Amsterdam
dididehooge@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
This report is proposing a mobile Q&A application based on user
features. The app is designed in order to create a platform where
people are able to ask questions which will be forwarded to
people that are in the possession of the knowledge related to the
query.
The application is a smart mobile systems that is making use of
natural language processing. It creates tags from every query
which will then be matched to people based on location and their
skills and interests provided in their profile.
This report presents the related work that is relevant for the
application. It describes the detailed approach, methods used,
interaction design and system description. Lastly, salient elements
of the discussion are examined and suggestions for further
research are provided.
Keywords
Q&A, application, mobile system, natural language processing,
intelligent interactive systems
1. INTRODUCTION
When people are looking for a specific piece of information, most
of the time search engines are consulted. However, a typical
search engine is not designed to come up with answers to specific
questions as they dont have the capability to combine several
pieces of information located in different parts of the knowledge
base (Zadeh, 2003). Also the results from search engines are often
biased, advertised, and not personal or specific enough. Looking
for the right answer to a specific question can take quite some
time. People often turn to their friends, families, and colleagues
when they have questions, which results in using social network
status messages to ask questions (Morris, Teevan, & Panovich,
2010). However, there are certain questions people dont want to
share with their social network or the correct knowledge might not
be available within their own network. As an alternative,
questions can be asked on online forums where people have
conversations in the form of posted messages. Unfortunately,
1
Celine van der Geer
University of Amsterdam
celine.nvdg@gmail.com
Thomas Hoornstra
University of Amsterdam
thomas@hoornstra.org
forums are mostly used within specific domains, thus people are
only able to ask specific questions as the members only have
knowledge about that domain. This can lead to a hunt for the right
forum that can take quite some time and it is uncertain how long it
will take for someone to answer the question and whether the
question will be answered at all.
The application that this paper proposes is a mobile question and
answer application based on user features. The application can be
used for question asking and answering within every domain by
the use of speech and/or text queries.
The system creates a profile by extracting likes from social media
accounts. When a question is asked by a user the system will
generate different tags from the question. Subsequently, the
question will be pushed to a specific number of people whose
skills and interests (likes) match the query the best.
2. RELATED WORK
2.1 Q&A online tools/applications
Question and answer (Q&A) sites such as Yahoo! Answers,
Quora.com, and Answerbag.com, are places where communities
of volunteers respond to questions. Everyday a ton of questions
are asked and answered on these websites. A variety of questions
is asked, while some search for technical information others
search for a good present for their one-year anniversary. Q&A
sites allow people to ask and answer questions in a broad range of
topics. Harper et al. (2008) identify three types of Q&A sites:
digital reference services, ask expert services, and
community Q&A. All have the same goal of helping users in
answering and asking questions; they achieve it in different ways.
Digital reference services is about delivering information
online, provided by library professionals, to users who cannot or
do not want to have face-to-face communication. Its about
helping people find or providing them with useful information, for
example in the form of emailing. An ask and expert service is an
online community, working with staffed experts in a particular
topic area. The interactions are topic-oriented discussions. For
example, some systems divide questions into categories
beforehand, which determine what expert will respond; others will
allow experts to declare to which questions to answer, while
community Q&A has little structure or role-based organization.
Some sites have moderators or users with earned privileges based
on earlier contributions. On these sites, users often have their
profiles and usernames and have off-topic discussions where they
can reply to one another.
Types of questions
There are many ways of asking a question. Harper et al. (2009)
describes two ways: informational questions and conversational
questions. The first one is where the user wants to receive some
factual or advise-oriented information. While the second one is
more about an intention of starting a discussion, where users are
interested in an opinion or they have the need to express
themselves. In 2010, Harper et al. are taking types of questions to
another level. By looking at the three species of the rhetorical
framework from Aristotle: deliberative (future-focused),
epideictic (present-focused) and forensic (past-focused). Their
taxonomy divides every species of this framework in two
subdivisions where they found out that the questioner seeks for
guidance, quality, or facts when asking a question that fits in the
framework.
Influence of anonymity
Paskuda and Lewkowicz (2016) did a research about how
anonymity influences user participation in an online question-and-
answer platform, in this case for the site Quora.com. They
developed a model with factors that influence participation and
asked users through a survey about their use of the anonymity
feature in Quora. The main finding was that, with anonymous
answers, social appreciation correlated with the answers length. A
second result of the study was that they found a link between
anonymity and politeness; anonymous comments were often
interpreted as not polite by the receivers. While the questioner has
other reasons to do so, one user said: I go anonymous when Im
revealing something that my family members wouldnt want other
people to know about.' Also, Paskuda and Lewkowicz (2016) used
the model to get a better perspective of the quality of anonymous
answers that were given by users. The receivers found them not
polite and half the survey users did not appreciate the anonymous
answers. On the other hand, users who wanted to stay anonymous
for responding to a question wouldnt have answered if the
anonymous feature had not existed. However, the results of the
survey led to a higher score in normal answers, without using the
anonymity feature.
2.2 Matching search queries with results
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing often provide
direct valuable knowledge to users and organize information in
such a way that it is easy to navigate. The focus for these
commercial search engines lies in one-way single-user scenarios.
The information retrieval process begins when the user enters a
query. A query is a formal statement of information needs and
appears in various types; the algorithm needs to identify several
objects that will match the query. The search engine result page
(SERP) presents results in two ways: organic which is about the
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results found by the algorithm and sponsored, which is about
information that is paid to be on top of the ranking. (Croft,
Metzler and Strohman, 2009) The user wants to see the results
that are the most relevant to their query at the highest rank of the
returned document list. The list returned by the search engine
consists of different kinds of results such as documents, pictures,
texts, articles, and more. For most search engines the result page
contains a ranked list of document summaries, with links to the
actual document of web pages (Kurland & Krikon, 2011). An
algorithm that uses significance factor to select the top sentences
for a summary ranks the summaries. This technique started with
H.P Luhn in the 1950s (Luhn, 1958) and from there on further
developed. It calculates the significance factor for a sentence
based on an occurrence of significant words. Significant words are
words of medium frequency in a document, which means that the
frequency score is between two thresholds of low and high
frequencies. Sentences containing these words are taken into
consideration for the summary. However, per sentence exist a
threshold, mostly not more than four significant words in one
sentence. The results of a search engine can vary widely,
especially when they have to deal with ambiguous query
formulation. The results can present a different interpretation of
the given query. This can be frustrating for the users if it takes a
long time to find the preferred topic or solution in the lists. A
clustering technique is needed to resolve this problem. By
clustering the results that are similar to one another, the user can
quickly scan through the results and find relevant topics to their
query. Clustering needs to be done efficient and specific to each
query, based on the top-ranked documents for that query. The
algorithm should be easy to understand and cluster using labels,
for example, a monothetic classifier (Croft, Metzler and
Strohman, 2009).
2.3 Speech search queries
Since the use of smartphones and cloud based computing the user
expectations and needs changed. People are accessing and using
information in a different way and expect to have a constant
access to the information and services the web has to offer.
Given the nature of delivery devices and the increased range of
usage scenarios, speech technology has taken on new importance
in accommodating user needs for ubiquitous mobile access - any
time, any place, any usage scenario, as part of any type of
activity (Neustein, 2010). In the past thirty years speech
recognition got improved and became more accurate, which
resulted in a more effectively human-machine interaction (Deng
& Huang, 2004).
Speech recognition systems can be used for different applications.
An example of such an application is spoken queries within a
search engine. Voice search is the technology underlying many
spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that provide users with the
information they request with a spoken query (Franz & Milch,
2002). A lot of different companies have developed speech-to-text
conversion system, in order to transcribe human speech (Bijl &
Hyde-Thomson, 2001). Over the last few years the number of
spoken queries to search through the web increased. At the
Linguistic Society of Americas meeting in 2016 Timothy Tuttle,
the Founder and CEO of MindMeld, stated that within one year
the use of spoken queries went from a statistical zero to 10 percent
of all search volume. Also Google stated that 20 percent of all
searches were voice searches (Young, 2016).
2.4 Natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) entails an area of research and
application that explores how to analyze and understand human
language in text or speech. Computational techniques analyze and
represent naturally occurring texts at one or more levels with the
purpose of performing desired tasks. Computational techniques
entail techniques from which to choose to accomplish a particular
part of language analysis. The naturally occurring text is in the
range of any language, mode, genre, etc. The text is either written
or spoken, in the latter case it needs to be a language used by
humans to communicate with one another. The text needs to be as
naturally as possible, and not specifically designed for the purpose
of this analysis. The notion of levels in the analysis is about the
various types of linguistic analysis; it is known that there are
multiple types of language processing during the produce of
language by humans. Usually people utilize these levels by
themselves. However, NLP systems utilize different levels or a
subset of these levels. Therefore, some NLP systems can be
considered weak, while others conveying more levels are
considered strong (Liddy, 2001). Basic techniques in the linguistic
processing in NLP applications such as tokenization, Part of
Speech (POS) tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER) and
classification, can undertake the complex tasks. These complex
tasks require being as accurate and efficient as possible. For
example, POS is the process of assigning part-of-speech tags to
words in a text. Typically the tag set includes tags such as nouns,
verbs, and adjectives. While the NER finds these nouns and
determines to what type of entity it refers. This function is useful
for location tagging. Brusting et al., (2016) proposed a high
precision GeoTextTagger using NLP approach. Working with text
and speech taggers as well as NAM, they found blocks of text that
referred to locations. By use of a knowledge base, a list with the
possible location is conceived. Finally, a location is chosen, by
assigning distance-based scores to every block of text.
2.5 Gamification
Gamification refers to implementing game mechanisms and
techniques in a non-game environment to engage and motivate
users to participate in (online) voluntary activities. Often it
involves a rewarding system, which encourages the users as they
progress through levels, to get a higher score or level. However,
there is limited research that argues gamification works in the
long term (Cavusoglu, Li, and Huang, 2015). Hamari et al. (2014)
argue what the psychological and behavioral outcomes are with
the use of gamification and what kinds of motivational
affordances are needed. The main results suggest that
gamification does works, however, the phenomenon itself is more
manifold than most studies often assumed. Influences on the
outcomes involve the role of the context being gamified and the
qualities of the users. Most of the studies did evaluate behavioral
and psychological outcomes by use of questionnaires or
interviews, which often resulted positive. In the context of
motivational affordances, most studies tested a large variety of
different elements used in reward systems. Elements like points,
leaderboards, and badges were the most commonly used variants
in reward systems. For example, the Stack Overflow Q&A site
relies on a hierarchical badge system to engage the users in giving
meaningful contributions. Cavusoglu et al. (2015) confirm the
value of the badges effectiveness of gamification is stimulating
the voluntary participation.
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3. INTERACTION DESIGN
This section will describe the human interaction with the system..
This will include the intended users, concept and application area
and the scenario and use cases.
3.1 Human-system interaction
A user is expected to interact with the system in a few ways. The
user is able to use text or speech for a query. When using text the
user has to type in the question. For speech the user can use the
microphone and record the question.
When registered to the app, the user will receive notifications.
There are different situations in which the user will receive
notifications. For example, when a new question is asked that
matches the user's profile or when an asked question has been
answered by another user.
The user is able to create a profile within the app. When
registering information will be extracted from social media
accounts. This information can be manually edited by the user.
3.2 Intended users
The application 42 can be used by everyone with a smartphone.
The app does not address a specific gender or age group.
However, looking at application usage statistics the age group that
spends the most time on apps are people between the age of 18
and 241. The intended users are people that are curious and want
questions to be answered by others and/or like to answer questions
that matches their own interests and skills.
3.3 Concept and application area
42 is an application that offers users a platform for asking
questions with the use of text or speech queries. The system is
making use of natural language processing in order to create tags
related to the question asked. By making use of these tags the
system will search for a specific amount of users, with the skills
and interests related to this topic or within the area of the
generated tags. The users interests and skills will be extracted
from their LinkedIn as they have to log in with their account when
they register for the app. The users who receive the question are
able to answer or decline the question. When the question is
answered, the user who asked the question, is able to select the
best answer. If a user declines to answer a question, the system
searches for the next best suitable user within the area of interest.
The user is able to decline a question if they dont know the
answer or when they dont feel like answering. When they dont
know the answer, they can choose for the option to receive the
answer that is selected as best answer. The system tracks all the
actions of the user within the application, this is saved and used to
automatically update their profile in order to improve their skills
and interests. To conclude, the application provides a platform
where people anonymously can ask anything, anywhere and at
any moment.
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http://www.businessofapps.com/app-usage-statistics-2015/
 In order to create the prototype for the application described, the
Ionic framework was used2. This was done in order to create a
3.4 Scenario & use cases working mobile application with integration of the Facebook API,
3.4.1 Scenario 1: Asking a question as well as a self created API to handle database calls and in order
John is in Amsterdam with his girlfriend for two days. On friday to analyze the questions to create tags.
night they want to got out for dinner. Johns girlfriend has a To be able to understand the choices made within this section, a
lactose intolerance which means they can not just go to any short description of the process of using the application will first
restaurant. John opens the app store to install the app 42. John is be given. The application can be split into two parts, the first part
registering with his LinkedIn profile so his skills can be extracted, is where a user is able to ask questions, the second part is where a
he then manually adds some of his interests and topics he has user is able to answer questions. For both of these parts, the
knowledge about and saves his settings. After that he opens the application relies heavily on the profile of the user.
home page and writes the following text query: does anyone know
At the start of the application, the user has the option to login with
a romantic restaurant that knows how to deal with lactose
a social media account or with their email address. After logging
intolerance in the centre of Amsterdam? Within five minutes John
in with a social media account, the application will process all
receives a notification that there are three responses to his
their likes and history to make up a profile about what they are
question. All three responses recommend different restaurants.
interested in. If the user logs in without a social media account,
John selects the recommendation with a restaurant where
they are prompted with an option to select categories of interest.
everything is without lactose as the best answer.
Based on their interests, the application will make up a personal
3.4.2 Scenario 2: Asking a question that has already profile.
been answered
Peter invited all his friends for dinner on saturday evening. On
friday he already starts preparing the dinner. He wants to make a
special Thai dish, but does not exactly know which ingredients he
needs to use, he uses the internet to find a good recipe. When he
collected all the needed ingredients he notices that there is one he
never heard of and doesnt know where to buy it in Rotterdam. He
already has the app 42 installed, so he grabs his phone and opens
the app. He uses the speech function and asks where he can buy
that specific ingredient in Rotterdam. The app creates tags from
his question and recognizes the combination of tags from the
already asked questions. Then the app shows the related questions
to Peter and he finds the same question as he asked, immediately
gaining the answer..
3.4.3 Scenario 3: Answering a question
It is Wednesday night and Nina is watching TV on her couch. She
gets a notification of the app 42: there is a question that matches
her skills and interests. Nina opens the app and looks at the new
question. She knows the answer so uses text to give an answer on
the asked question. She looks at her tv again, feeling satisfied to
have helped someone.
Figure 1. Login using social media to automatically generate your
3.4.4 Scenario 4: Not being able to answer a question interests.
Claire is on her way to work when she gets a notification about a
new question in the 42 app that matches her skills and interests.
When Claire opens the question she realises that she is not able to After setting up the personal profile, the user is able to ask
answer the questions but would be interested in the answer. She questions. When the user asks a question, the system analyzes the
selects the option to skip the questions and to receive the answer. question, using natural language processing, and creates relevant
A few minutes later she receives a notification that the question tags that belong to the question. The user is able to remove
has been answered, an interesting answer! generated tags if they are irrelevant to the question. Once the user
saves the question, the created tags are run through a comparison
algorithm to see if similar questions have already been asked. If a
4. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION question (or multiple) that appears similar has already been asked,
This section will describe the system and its components. This the user is presented with the question and asked if this is what
will include the architecture, design, data structures, APIs, and they want to know. This question comparison is an important step,
and requires proper analysis of the tags, therefore this algorithm
algorithms that are used. As one might quickly notice, this
will be explained later in this section. When the question is new
application requires a very thorough analysis of the questions and
and the user actually asks the question, the system determines
answer provided by the users. For the prototype shown, this
which users would be able to best answer the question and only
analysis is still in its basic form, however, the application will be
described with the components that would be implemented in a
2
final system. http://www.ionicframework.com/
4
pushes the question to the people that are relevant (so the people
that may have knowledge about that question, based on their
profile). The way this matching is done is explained later in this
section.
Figure 2. Asking a question, tags are automatically generated.
In order to make the system fair, at sign up, people are allowed to
ask only two questions. After that, they have to perform tasks like
answering questions to gain points. Points are allocated per
category, thus if a user answers a question regarding gardening,
the user gains points on that category only. The combined points
of all categories, however, determines your level in the
application, and thus the amount of questions you are allowed to
ask.
Figure 3. Users gain points per category, points can be earned as
seen in the figure.
5
The other part of the application is where users answer a question.
In between these two parts is where the magic of the application
happens and this will be explained later in this section. When a
user is selected to answer a question, they get a notification on
their smartphone. When they open the application, they can view
the questions that they have been selected to answer. If they know
the answer to a question, they can fill it in and the answer is
pushed to the user who asked the question. It can of course
happen that the user does not know the answer, and thus they can
select so. When doing this, the user can select the option to get
pushed the answer as well, giving the user the opportunity to learn
from others in turn. During the use of the application, user profiles
are updated constantly, however, this will be explained later in
this section.
Figure 4. Users can answer questions that they are given.
When a question gets answered, the user who asked the question
gets notified, including any users who have selected to be notified,
as stated in the previous paragraph. The user can wait to gain
more responses, or can select the best answer from the answers
given.
Figure 5. A user can accept an answer as the best answer. On
the overview page, a user can view his/her activity.
4.1 Analyzing the question
As the previous section shows, there is a lot that needs to be
thought of while creating such an application. The most difficult
part is to understand the questions the users are asking, however,
this is also the most important part. Over time and with better
technology, the understanding of the questions being asked can
improve, improving the application. An important understanding
lies in actually understanding the content of a question. This
understanding is used in multiple components of the application,
as can be seen in the algorithms shown in the next sections.
Another way the application uses the analysis of the question is by
asking for missing information when a user asks a question. The
question How can I fix my television? lacks a lot of
information, such as what type of television is it, what is currently
not working, etc. By understanding the content of the question,
the questions can be improved by the user before asking it.
The content of the question is also important to determine
questions that warrant a warning, such as I cough up blood and
have a headache, what should I do?, the user should be warned
that the answer he/she receives is in no way a reassurance or
sound medical advice, and that they should visit a doctor.
4.2 Already asked questions
Within this process, it is important to analyze the question
properly. There are multiple things to consider, first of all,
location. As questions may be asked that are location specific, it is
important to distinguish questions that look similar but relate to a
specific location. The question Where can I find a romantic
restaurant in Amsterdam? looks pretty similar to Where can I
find a romantic restaurant in New York?, however, the answer to
the one question is obviously not going to be the same as for the
other.
Another important aspect is temporal, since a question asked
previously may no longer be relevant. Take, for example, the
question How can I watch a movie on the internet?. Five years
ago this question would generate different answers than today,
thus this needs to be analyzed as well. There are multiple options
for handling this, one could be to simply state that an answer is
valid for a specific amount of time. A second option could be to
implement a machine learning algorithm that learns from the
system by having people that answer the question, or people that
ask similar questions mark the answers as outdated. We chose,
however, to analyze the content of the question to see if it entails a
quickly changing field, and dependant on that decide the timeout
of an answer. As we can determine that the internet is a
relatively quickly changing field, an answer given five years ago
is almost certainly outdated today.
4.3 Linking questions to users
In order to send the right questions to matching users who should
be able to answer the question, the question needs to be analyzed
and compared to the user interests. As mentioned, first the tags of
the question are determined. Within this determination it is
important to consider the actual meaning of the question. A
question like How do I patrol in the snow at night? and How
6
do I listen to Snow Patrol at night? should yield different tags
and select different users to ask the question to.
Another important aspect of analyzing the content of the question
within this process, is to determine the amount of people that
receive the question. It is important to differentiate between
questions that should reach just a few people that would know the
answer, or a question that should reach anyone in a vicinity. As an
example examine the question: Who has locked their bike to
mine?, this question is not answerable by a person that knows a
lot about bikes or locks, but rather the single person who has
locked their bike to another. This question should therefore be
pushed to anyone that could have done this, such as the entire
neighbourhood.
One more important aspect to consider is the response time
required by the question. A question could warrant an immediate
response, and the users that receive the question should therefore
be able to answer swiftly. A way to do this could be to analyze
response times of previous actions of users. This could determine
moments where they respond quickly, and moments where they
respond slowly. Another way is to analyze the calendars of the
users in order to determine if they would be able to answer
immediately. The question could also be pushed to more users, as
this would increase the chance to gain a faster response.
All of the above is taken into consideration while selecting users
that will receive the question, but the most important part is to
make sure the user would actually be able to answer the question.
To make sure that likelihood is as big as possible, the tags
generated for the question are compared to the categories in a
users profile. Since a user gains points per category, their
proficiency in a category is known. This can be used to select the
best matching users for the question. An example could be:
Where can I find the best italian food near me?, generating the
tags: italian food", near Amsterdam Noord. All users that have
the categories italian food and Amsterdam Noord are
retrieved, and their score on both categories is added together. A
user could have a score of five in italian food and ten in
Amsterdam Noord, another could have a score six in italian
food and sixteen in Amsterdam Noord, their respective scores
would be 15 and 22. The users are then ranked according to these
scores and filtered according to the different aspects mentioned in
the paragraphs above. The top X users, as determined, are given
the question to answer, and receive a notification.
4.4 Updating user profiles
During the use of the application, the user profiles are constantly
updated when a user performs an action. Especially when
answering questions this is of great importance. As the system
selects users based on their knowledge, it is important to update
this knowledge along the way. If a user is unable to answer a
question, it is important to refrain from asking a user a question
like that again. However, this is not very easy as similar questions
might be answerable by a user. The combination of certain tags
needs to be analyzed in order to determine which part of the
question is an unknown area for the user, and thus in which area
their level needs to be adjusted. To do this it is, again, important
to understand the content of the question.
4.5 Categories & Facebook API
The ultimate goal for the application is to combine data of various
social media platforms to make the best possible profile of the
users. For the prototype, Facebook was used to build a profile.
The profile consists of categories that are generated by scraping
all the likes of the user. These likes are only for the pages and
items that the user liked. In addition to likes, the users name,
gender and profile picture are scraped. In an ideal application
additional features such as: comments, likes on messages, work
history, videos, user tagged places, religion, relationships, photos,
posts, location, hometown, events, education and their birthday;
could be used to build a more complete profile. The scraping of
information has been done through the use of the Facebook Graph
API3. The Facebook API enables users to login and connect
Facebook to the prototype. The prototype automatically fetches
their likes and these will be added to their profile as categories.
The categories are searchable for all the users, and by doing so;
the database generates categories (a collection) that could be used
for all the users. In this prototype, the likes (and multiple terms)
will be split in separate categories. The same will be done for
questions of users. The categories that were generated by asking a
question are also stored in the same searchable table as the profile
categories.
4.6 Datamodel
In order to save the data generated by users a database is used.
The communication to the database is done via an API that can
handle calls to save and retrieve the data. The database model is
shown below. In the application itself the data is handled as json
object. This makes it easily readable, editable where necessary,
and it is easy to transfer between views.
Figure 6. A scheme of the database.
4.7 Question analysis
Natural language processing plays an important role in the
question analysis of our system. For the system to determine
which users should be able to answer a certain question, the
system not only needs to know everything about every user, but
3 4
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/
7
also needs to deeply understand the asked question. To prototype
this, Googles Cloud Natural Language API4 is used. Our system
feeds the asked question to Googles API, whereafter important
keywords, categories and places are returned. So for those
keywords, not only the specific keyword, but also the
superordinate category is returned. So when a user asks a question
about pasta, the keyword italian food is also returned. This
helps our system to assign relevant tags to the asked question,
gaining better knowledge about the context of the question. The
generated tags are then compared to the categories of users like
explained earlier, linking questions to relevant users.
5. DISCUSSION
While designing the system and testing the prototype a few points
of discussion came up. An obvious point to consider is the privacy
concern that comes into play. As the system scrapes and uses
information from social media accounts, people could be
concerned for their privacy. The data, however, is always
changeable by the user, as they can edit their categories. The
categories are used in the creation of a widespread category
database, however, this is not linked to a single person.
Talking with users testing the system about this privacy concern,
the most mentioned aspect was anonymity. Two main topics arose
from this discussion, the first being that a user should be able to
ask questions anonymously. For some users it was of importance
to ask certain questions without others knowing who they were,
this could be beneficial for questions regarding taboo topics in a
certain culture, topics that include private information, etc. The
second discussion point was centered around the idea of not
trusting anonymous answers. When asking users if they would
want the system to be fully anonymous the answer was a decisive
no. They expressed that they would not fully trust answers from
an anonymous person. For this reason, when improving this
prototype, users should get the option to ask and answer question
anonymously, however, users who answer anonymously should
be warned about the consequence that it lowers the trust in the
answer. Another important thing to note here is that the
anonymity can only be created towards other users. Anonymity
towards the system will only cause the system to perform badly,
as it relies heavily on understanding the question and the user
(categories) to perform properly.
One more thing that came up during testing was users trolling the
system. While trying to have people ask and answer questions,
they would put in fake answers, sometimes because it was for the
sake of testing, but sometimes just to be funny. This is a real
possibility within an actual working application as well.
Therefore, it is important to, again, analyze the content of the
answer to see if it is an answer to troll the system or whether it is
an actual real answer.
During the creation of the application, in a conversation with
people important to the project, the reward system first designed
for the application was discussed. This reward system was
comprised of users gaining levels for their actions within the
application. Just as explained in this paper, users would gain
levels by performing certain actions, which would allow them to
ask a certain amount of questions in the application. The levels
gained here, however, were not based on categories, not allowing
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
for the application to properly match questions to users. In the
discussion, the point was brought up, and the reward system was
changed, thus people gain levels per category, allowing for a more
logical view of a users skills, as well as a better matching
between questions and users.
Something to consider when deploying this application in a real
life environment, are the costs for running such a system, as the
system uses and generates a lot of data. If the systems is used on a
large scale, the amount of data generated is vast. This does bring
added benefits as this data can be used for all kinds of interesting
data analysis or research as described in Future Work. This could
also be the side of the application that generates the revenue to
keep it up and running.
6. CONCLUSION
Typical search engines are not designed to come up with answers
to specific questions. They are not able to combine several pieces
of information located in different parts of the knowledge base.
As an alternative, forums can be used, but those are usually very
domain specific. In recent years question asking on social media
increased but not all questions are suitable for such platforms, nor
is all knowledge available within ones network.
This report described an application that is providing a Q&A
platform for question asking and answering. Within the
application questions concerning every domain can be asked. The
questions will be forwarded to a number of people with the proper
knowledge included in their profile, and thus should be able to
answer the question. Besides matching skills and interests, the
system is able to identify locations and forward questions to
people within the same area when requested by the query.
User profiles are being created by extracting likes from social
media accounts. These skills and interests can also be manually
adjusted. However, the system also tracks all the actions of the
user within the application and is automatically updating user
profiles in order to improve the matching of questions and skills
and interests.
In order to make sure users will not only ask questions without
helping other people by answering their questions, a reward
system is being used. By signing up, people are allowed to ask
two questions. After using the two questions, the system
motivates the users by making use of levels. Within the
application points are allocated per category. The combined points
of all categories, determines the user level in the application and
the amount of questions a user is allowed to ask.
As shown in this paper, the application relies heavily on
understanding the content of the questions and answers provided
by users. As the possibilities in this field grow, the application
becomes better at providing the user with what they need.
7. FUTURE WORK
As people usually have a differentiation between personal and
work accounts, linking a social media account will not provide all
their interests and knowledge. A possible extension of the
application described could be to have a user link multiple
accounts, creating the possibility to generate categories over more
of their knowledge, providing a more extensive profile.
As shown in this paper, understanding the content of text, can
8
create great technological advances, helping people to find
answers to questions quickly and efficiently. The current
understanding of machines over such content is, however, still in
early stages. While this field improves and machines can gain a
better understanding of the content of text, more applications for
its use will come to light. In this paper we have proposed one such
application, however, future research could indicate much more
possibilities, answering questions directly from information found
online could be a possibility, although this requires much work.
One interesting possibility, after the creation of this application,
lies within its data. As much data is collected about user interests,
knowledge, questions, and answers, this can be used to analyze
and detect patterns. An example of this could be to see where
certain knowledge is lacking, if a certain location generally asks
questions about a certain topic, and has gained levels in certain
categories, we can conclude that in a certain area, one category is
well known, while another is lacking. This could be interesting to
examine, as it could, for example, show the knowledge
diversification around the world and determine a cultures ability
to share this knowledge. The data collected by the system could
be used in many other ways, and this would be a very interesting
aspect to research.
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