Summary: Exploring Web Browsing Context
for Collaborative Question Answering
Carnegie Mellon University
Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) sites such as Yahoo!
Answers and recent real-time CQA sites such as Aardvark, provide
a promising approach for information seeking. Yet, the behavior of
the answerers, especially the factors influencing the quality and
timeliness of the answers, are not well understood. We hypothesize
that the information context of the answerer at the time a question is
received is an important factor in the effectiveness of CQA systems.
As a first step in exploring this hypothesis, our study shows that the