Expert recommendation in community question answering: a review and future direction

Purpose – This paper aims to make it convenient for those who have only just begun their research into Community Question Answering (CQA) expert recommendation, and for those who are already concerned with this issue, to ease the extension of our understanding with future research. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, keywords such as “CQA”, “Social Question Answering”, “expert recommendation”, “question routing” and “expert finding” are used to search major digital libraries. The final sample includes a list of 83 relevant articles authored in academia as well as industry that have been published from January 1, 2008 to March 1, 2019. Findings – This study proposes a comprehensive framework to categorize extant studies into three broad areas of CQA expert recommendation research: understanding profile modeling, recommendation approaches and recommendation system impacts. Originality/value – This paper focuses on discussing and sorting out the key research issues from these three research genres. Finally, it was found that conflicting and contradictory research results and research gaps in the existing research, and then put forward the urgent research topics.