Proficiency Assessment of Experts in Online Social network Q/A Communities

Detecting experts and their quality continuous participation in online networks of Question/Answer based communities has always been an important area of research in the field of Online Social networks. Various algorithms and measures based on identifying network structure, user behavior, link analysis have been used. Most of these expert finding methods focus on count of answer, gamification score but fail to give due credit to the usefulness and quality of posts. The kind of questions posed by a user and the quality of answers provided throw a significant light on the expertise of a user. This paper measures the proficiency of an expert on these two pertinent factors. The work proposes a novel metric ‘Proficiency Score’ which measures the expertise of a user in Online Question/Answer networks. The presented approach considers various factors such as the number of people benefitted from an expert's posts; the frequency of information(answer/question) provided; (popularity) of an expert for a particular tag and usability of a post (question/answer). It was experimentally established that “Proficiency Score” is indicative of a more active participation of the expert as compared to the existing metrics.