What Makes a High-Quality User-Generated Answer?

Community-driven question-answering (CQA) services on the Internet let users share content in the form of questions and answers. Usually, questions attract multiple answers of varying quality from other users. A new approach aims to identify high-quality answers from candidate answers to questions that are semantically similar to the new question. Toward that end, the authors developed and tested a quality framework comprising social, textual, and content-appraisal features of user-generated answers in CQA services. Logistic-regression analysis revealed that content-appraisal features were the strongest predictor of quality. These features include dimensions such as comprehensiveness, truthfulness, and practicality.