SmartQ: A question and answer system for supplying high-quality and trustworthy answers

Question and Answer (Q&A) systems aggregate the collected intelligence of all users to provide satisfying answers for questions. A well-developed Q&A system should incorporate features such as high question response rate, high answer quality, a spam-free environment for users. Previous works use reputation systems to achieve the goals. However, these reputation systems evaluate a user with an overall rating for all questions the user has answered regardless of the question categories, thus the reputation score does not accurately reflect the user's ability to answer a question in a specific category. We propose SmartQ: a reputation based Q&A System. SmartQ employs a category and theme based reputation management system to evaluate users' willingness and capability to answer various kinds of questions. The reputation system facilitates the forwarding of a question to favorable experts, which improves the question response rate and answer quality. Also, SmartQ incorporates a lightweight spammer detection method to identify potential spammers. Our trace-driven simulation on PeerSim demonstrates the effectiveness of SmartQ in providing a good user experience. We then develop a real application of SmartQ and deploy it for use in a student group in Clemson University. The user feedback shows that SmartQ can provide high-quality answers for users in a community.