Measuring difficulty levels of JavaScript questions in Question-Answer Community based on concept hierarchy

Online inquiry communities such as Question-Answer Communities (QAC) have captured interest of online users since they can share and search for any information from any place in the world. The number of questions and answers submitted to a popular community can increase rapidly, and that can make it difficult for users who look for the “right” questions to answer. That is, from the view of knowledgeable experienced users, they tend to look for hard challenging questions as an opportunity to share their knowledge and to build respect with the community. Hence it is desirable to distinguish difficult questions from easy ones. Current researches estimate complexity of questions based on the analysis of the features of the QAC without considering the contents of the questions. This paper presents a method to measure question difficulty levels based directly on the question contents. In particular, we analyze the difficulty of terms that appear in a JavaScript-related question, based on the proposed JavaScript concept hierarchy. In an evaluation of the performance of the question difficulty estimation, our concept-based measure gives similar performance to that of the existing measure based on the features of the QAC, but when they are used together, the performance can be enhanced.