TY - JOUR
T1 - VisQAC
T2 - Visual Analytics for Online Q&A Communities
AU - Liang, Jing
AU - Jia, Ruoyu
AU - Zhu, Min
AU - Duh, Henry B.L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Supported by Major Development Program of Sichuan Province (18ZDYF1790); Key Technology R&D Program of Chengdu City (2015-HM01-00484-SF); the National Science and Technology Major Project (2018ZX100201AA-002-004).
Funding Information:
Received摇 2017鄄12鄄23 Supported by Major Development Program of Sichuan Prov鄄 ince (18ZDYF1790); Key Technology R&D Program of Cheng鄄 du City (2015鄄HM01鄄00484鄄SF); the National Science and Technology Major Project (2018ZX100201AA鄄002鄄004) 苣 Author for correspondence, professor, Ph. D. E鄄mail: zhumin@ scu. edu. cn DOI: 10. 15918 / j. jbit1004鄄0579. 17196
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Editorial Department of Journal of Beijing Institute of Technology .
PY - 2019/6/1
Y1 - 2019/6/1
N2 - Online question and answer (Q&A) communities, which allow users to exchange knowledge by asking and answering questions, have become increasingly popular. As a result of user active participation, these communities store overwhelming volumes of information. However, existing related methods are unable to meet community operators' needs for analyzing multi-dimensional Q&A sequences and understanding user behavior. In this paper, collaborating with domain experts in online community, we present a system, VisQAC, which explores the patterns of Q&A sequence and user behavior. In the system, a novel visual design is proposed, which is combined with flexible mapping measures for analyzing critical characteristics of sequence data. Moreover, a timeline visualization method is designed to visualize data with categorical attributes and its correlation can be displayed flexibly by choosing time mode and time granularity. The usefulness and effectiveness of the system are demonstrated with several case studies of VisQAC with community operators based on the Zhihu dataset. Our evaluation shows that VisQAC is beneficial to the understanding of Q&A sequence and associated user behavior.
AB - Online question and answer (Q&A) communities, which allow users to exchange knowledge by asking and answering questions, have become increasingly popular. As a result of user active participation, these communities store overwhelming volumes of information. However, existing related methods are unable to meet community operators' needs for analyzing multi-dimensional Q&A sequences and understanding user behavior. In this paper, collaborating with domain experts in online community, we present a system, VisQAC, which explores the patterns of Q&A sequence and user behavior. In the system, a novel visual design is proposed, which is combined with flexible mapping measures for analyzing critical characteristics of sequence data. Moreover, a timeline visualization method is designed to visualize data with categorical attributes and its correlation can be displayed flexibly by choosing time mode and time granularity. The usefulness and effectiveness of the system are demonstrated with several case studies of VisQAC with community operators based on the Zhihu dataset. Our evaluation shows that VisQAC is beneficial to the understanding of Q&A sequence and associated user behavior.
KW - Online Q&A community
KW - Sequence data
KW - User behavior
KW - Visual analytics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85071036788&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.15918/j.jbit1004-0579.17196
DO - 10.15918/j.jbit1004-0579.17196
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85071036788
SN - 1004-0579
VL - 28
SP - 305
EP - 317
JO - Journal of Beijing Institute of Technology (English Edition)
JF - Journal of Beijing Institute of Technology (English Edition)
IS - 2
ER -