IIT Madras Hack U Answers Presentation

1. Yahoo! Answers
Siju Varghese
Engineer, Yahoo! Answers
IIT Chennai, Mar’12

2. Yahoo! Answers - background
Community Question Answering (CQA)
“Just because Google exists does not mean you Home > All Categories > Arts & Humanities > Philosophy
should stop asking things”, A. Totsis, TechCrunch,
2010
• Largest Community Question Answering
Site with more than 1B answers (
http://bit.ly/am1LwL )
• 4th most popular property on yahoo
network
• 3.5 answers/question, 11 minutes to first
answer on an average.
• Community Moderated, no editorial
control.
• Supports 12 langs.
• Model:
– Content-driven (different from Quora , which
is social-driven)
– Subjective quality model (different from
WikiAnswers or StackOverflow)
• By default broadcast questions to *all* potential
users
• Asker picks best answer (subjectivity rules):
“Quality in the eye of the asker” even if the
community disagrees

3. A veritable gold mine of data…
• User Interest Analysis
– Seekers
– Knowledge Experts
• Sentiment Analysis

4. FEW RESEARCH PROJECTS

5. Lets meet some Answerers

6. Lilly http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=OzaaPpm8aa

7. Jane http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=hFEx4VF7aa

8. Alice http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=SZRbSI3Uaa

9. • Problem: About 15% of incoming questions are
unanswered
• Key observation: Recurrent questions are
prevalent in many categories
– What are the symptoms of cervical cancer?
– How much weight Should I lose?
– How do you train your cat to use the litterbox?
– What is a black hole?
• Possible Solution: use past answered
questions to automatically answer new
questions.

10. Why is it difficult?
Title: • Non-informative, ambiguous title
How often should i jump?
• Complex information need
Body:
• Detailed and personal
I have a 6yo cob, and we've started
jumping, he's done it before, we're only
jumping around 1-1,8 foot. He isn't fat • Multiple questions posed in one
and he's quite fit. I jumped him on
Friday, but did just 3 small jumps, i did
flatwork on Saturday, and jumped him 3 • Grammatical errors, slang
times today then hacked out, tomorrow,
should i just flatwork him or would he be
ok to jump a few small singles? Like 3? I • Non factual, rather opinion and
won't ride him again until recommendation is expected
Wednesday/Thursday to give him a
break, what do you think? He is fine
doing what he has done, he doesn't get • Extensive variability among
sweaty much or tired, i myself am not questions: in language style,
ready to go any higher and would like to cultural aspects, degree of detail
just do maybe 1 or 2 jumps? Is he ok to
jump tomorrow? If not when next? Thank
you for the help! I appreciate it all! :) xx

11. Auto Answering System

12. Findings
• Robots have been answering for about a week,
saturating their daily answering quota.
• Significant fraction of the answers have been
chosen as Best Answer – much better than an
average user
• Their responses elicited discussions, and they
acquired several fans
Learning from the Past: Answering New Questions with Past Answers”
- Anna Shtok, Gideon Dror, Idan Szpektor and Yoelle Maarek
http://www2012.wwwconference.org/program/accepted-papers/main-scientific-tracks/

13. Get me a question that I can answer

14. • Users want to answer new questions
– No social information on such questions (item cold-start)
– This known scenario in recommendation systems is our typical case
• Many users are new
– Hardly any answering history (user cold-start)
– The majority of registered users
• Current solution: show most recent questions in the
category
• Goal: a question recommendation model that fits all
user types
– Active users,
– new users,
– surfers

15. Question Recommender
• Recommender system approach, (like for movie
recommendation but in a much larger and very sparse
space)
• Learn from past interactions with users and push
relevant open questions
I want to answer, who has a question? Yahoo! Answers Recommender System ”
- G. Dror, Y. Koren, Y. Maarek and I. Szpektor, KDD’2011, San-Diego, CA

16. Sentiment Analysis

17. • Why do people ask questions on Answers?
– Users more likely to register with Y!A to ask things
they can‘t ask elsewhere (“conversational”,
”personal”)
– When you can’t find what you are looking for on www
• Different (demographic) groups use it differently
– Women ask more conversational questions
– Older people ask more informational questions
– Women are more sentimental when answering a
question than men.
– In terms of attitude, men are more neutral, whereas
women have more positive attitude in their answers

18. Credits:
Giovanni Gardelli, Ingmar Weber, Antti Ukkonen, B. Barla Cambazoglu – Y! Research Barcelona
Onur Kucuktunc, The Ohio State University, US
Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, Bilkent University, Turkey

19. Some more…
• Relating answers activity to activities around
the world.
– Huge drop in science & math category in mid-
December every year. This category is heavily used
for homework help -- effect of Christmas break?
• ~ 35 small and big hacks during the 2011 Y!
hack day event @ blr.
– Android/iOS apps.
• Location awareness.
– Promote relevant Q&A on content pages.
– Answers on other channels : Messgener, SMS etc.
– Custom UI themes

20. Enablers

21. • Answers Data on the Grid
• Answers Api’s
– V1 : http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/
• Provides only read capability.
– V2 (internal beta)
• Offers full fledged capabilities – Read & Write.
• Preview available for this HackU event.

22. Credits

23. • Yahoo Research Labs – Haifa, Israel.
Gideon Dror, Yehuda Koren, Yoelle Maarek, Dan Pelleg, Idan Szpektor, Oleg Rokhlenko
• Yahoo! Research Labs, Barcelona
Giovanni Gardelli, Ingmar Weber, Antti Ukkonen, B. Barla Cambazoglu
• Yahoo! Answers Engineering, Bangalore