Expert as a Service: Software Expert Recommendation via Knowledge Domain Embeddings in Stack Overflow

Question answering (Q&A) communities have gained momentum recently as an effective means of knowledge sharing over the crowds, where many users are experts in the real-world and can make quality contributions in certain domains or technologies. Although the massive user-generated Q&A data present a valuable source of human knowledge, a related challenging issue is how to find those expert users effectively. In this paper, we propose a framework for finding such experts in a collaborative network. Accredited with recent works on distributed word representations, we are able to summarize text chunks from the semantics perspective and infer knowledge domains by clustering pre-trained word vectors. In particular, we exploit a graph-based clustering method for knowledge domain extraction and discern the shared latent factors using matrix factorization techniques. The proposed clustering method features requiring no post-processing of clustering indicators and the matrix factorization method is combined with the semantic similarity of the historical answers to conduct expertise ranking of users given a query. We use Stack Overflow, a website with a large group of users and a large number of posts on topics related to computer programming, to evaluate the proposed approach and conduct extensively experiments to show the effectiveness of our approach.