Belief Measure of Expertise for Experts Detection in Question Answering Communities: case study Stack Overflow

Online Question Answering Communities (Q& A C) provide a valuable amount of information in several topics. The major challenge with Q& A C is the detection of the authoritative users. When manipulating real world data, we have to deal with imperfections and uncertainty that can occur. In this paper, we propose a belief measure of expertise allowing us to detect users with the highest degree of expertise based on their attributes. Experiments on a dataset from a large online Q&A Community prove that the proposed model can be used to improve the identification of most expert users.