@inproceedings{liu2008understanding, author = {Liu, Yuanjie and Li, Shasha and Cao, Yunbo and Lin, Chin-Yew and Han, Dingyi and Yu, Yong}, title = {Understanding and Summarizing Answers in Community-Based Question Answering Services}, booktitle = {COLING 2008, Manchester, UK}, year = {2008}, month = {August}, abstract = {Community-based question answering (cQA) services have accumulated millions of questions and their answers over time. In the process of accumulation, cQA ser-vices assume that questions always have unique best answers. However, with an in-depth analysis of questions and answers on cQA services, we find that the assump-tion cannot be true. According to the anal-ysis, at least 78% of the cQA best answers are reusable when similar questions are asked again, but no more than 48% of them are indeed the unique best answers. We conduct the analysis by proposing taxonomies for cQA questions and an-swers. To better reuse the cQA content, we also propose applying automatic sum-marization techniques to summarize an-swers. Our results show that question-type oriented summarization techniques can improve cQA answer quality significantly.}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/understanding-and-summarizing-answers-in-community-based-question-answering-services/}, }