A posting recommendation system for question formulation: a healthcare Q&A forum study

Abstract

Owing to prosperous online social communities, Q&A forums become another place to give useful health-information and address users’ difficulties about particular health topics. However, different from browsing data on a search engine, constructing clear questions on specific forums usually needs more efforts. The recommendation mechanism appears to improve the usability of Internet forums. In the past, recommendation mechanisms tend to find suitable repliers or provide similar questions as a reference. This paper focuses on the asking process. We apply the design science methodology to develop an interactive recommender. Its goal is to support users in understanding more about self-issues, organizing thoughts and receiving effective answers faster. The proposed recommender will be evaluated with a user study to see if users become more engaged in the question generation. Also, we verify whether modified questions attract experts or experienced users more attention on the health care Q&A forum. The questions through recommendation mechanisms will be compared to the questions without any recommendations to see whether they can be easily grouped to relevant existed questions. If our design can be proved useful, the speed of interaction between question and answer may go up under any circumstances.