Our paper “Sustainable Questions” with Bart de Goede and Maarten de Rijke has been accepted at the Time Aware Information Access workshop at SIGIR’12. Our paper can be found here.

Abstract

Community question-answering platforms have large repositories of previously answered questions. Reusing the answers for new questions is tempting. However, not all stored answers will still be relevant. We define a new and challenging problem concerning the sustainability of questions, and present metrics aimed at distinguishing between sustainable and non-sustainable questions. We find that an intuitive approach to sustainability of questions is not sufficient, but that simple properties can already distinguish between sustainable and non-sustainable questions.