An answer recommendation algorithm for medical community question answering systems

Online medical community question answering (cQA) systems are playing important roles as a supplement of the traditional medical service systems. The answer recommendation service provides guidance to diagnose diseases and brings convenience and valuable reference to users. In this paper, we propose a method to recommend answer for particular questions on medical cQA system. There are three steps for the answer recommendation system, including similar cases retrieval, answers quality estimation and answer recommendation. The proposed algorithm is tested on a dataset collected from online medical community question answering system. The results show a good performance in answer recommendation.