Social tagging behaviour in community-driven question answering

On-line community services such as Live QnA and Yahoo! Answers enable their members to ask questions and have them answered by the community. The questions are labelled by the users to facilitate search, navigation, and recommendations. In this paper we provide an in-depth analysis of the question labelling practices by contrasting the use of community generated tags in the Live QnA service with the use of topic categories from a fixed taxonomy in the Yahoo! Answers service. We found that community tagging is related to higher levels of social interactions amongst users. Analysis of the most frequently used community tags reveals that active users may establish strong social ties around specific tags. Furthermore, the discriminative value of individual community tags can be low since the corresponding questions may cover a variety of topics. Thus, appropriate care needs to be taken when designing search, browsing, and recommender features for question discovery.