User interest modeling and its application for question recommendation in user-interactive question answering systems

In this paper, we propose a generative model, the Topic-based User Interest (TUI) model, to capture the user interest in the User-Interactive Question Answering (UIQA) systems. Specifically, our method aims to model the user interest in the UIQA systems with latent topic method, and extract interests for users by mining the questions they asked, the categories they participated in and relevant answer providers. We apply the TUI model to the application of question recommendation, which automatically recommends to certain user appropriate questions he might be interested in. Data collection from Yahoo! Answers is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model in question recommendation, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed model.

► Question recommendation is used to facilitate users in UIQA systems to obtain interesting information. ► The topic-based user interest model is proposed for question recommendation. ► The topic model narrows down the semantic gap between questions in UIQA systems.