Using Graph Analysis Approach to Support Question & Answer on Enterprise Social Network

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) service is getting more popular recently. It can help employees to communicate and collaborate efficiently with colleagues, with customers and with suppliers. One significant phenomenon happening on ESN is question & answer: people posting questions to the network to get answers from friends or friends-of-friends. However, existing ESN platforms do not have good support to this process. In this paper, we propose a method to better support question & answer on ESN, purely by using a graph analysis approach. Based on the questioner's initial input list of potential answerers, it can extract a shared-interest group of people, whose interest is close to the initial list of potential answerers, and sort the group of people according to a score of interest distance, and then recommend them to the questioner. To evaluate its applicability, the method is implemented in KDWeibo the most popular ESN platform in China, and the results are promising.