New directions in social question answering

Social Question Answering (SQA) services are emerging as a valuable information resource that is rich not only in the expertise of the user community but also their interactions and insights. The next generation SQA services are challenged in many fronts, including but not limited to: massive, heterogeneous, and streaming collections, diverse and challenging users, and the need to be sensitive to context and ambiguity. However, scholarly inquiries have yet to dovetail into a composite research stream where techniques gleaned from various research domains could be used for harnessing the information richness in SQA services to address these challenges. This chapter first explores the SQA domain by understanding the service and its modules, and then investigating previous studies that were conducted in this domain. This chapter then compares SQA services with traditional question answering systems to identify possible research challenges. Finally, new directions in SQA are proposed