Session details: CQA'12 workshop 3

ABSTRACTWe are delighted to welcome you to CQA 2012, the first Community Question Answering (CQA) workshop, under the umbrella of the WWW 2012 conference held in Lyon, France. Background: Despite the continuous progress of Web search engines in the last 20 years, many users' needs still remain unanswered. Two common reasons for queries not being satisfied are (1) the intent behind the query not being well expressed, and (2) the absence of relevant content. Subjective or narrow needs, for which content was not created before the need was expressed, will keep appearing no matter how Web search engines progress. This innate limitation of web search engines has led to the emergence of Community Question Answering (CQA) services in the last decade, such as Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Zhidao, Quora, Facebook Questions, and many topic-specific forums such as Stack Overflow. These services are designed to help users obtain information from a community, offering a wide variety of approaches (e.g., broadcasting the question to the whole community, just directed to friends, or specifically targeted to topic experts). Most importantly, these sites serve an active community of millions of users, and continue generating a great deal of popular Web content. Goals: While CQA services have been active for almost a decade, and are a popular subject of multiple research studies and publications in a variety of Web-related conferences, they have not, to the best of our knowledge, been a focus of a dedicated workshop in a top conference. The goal of this workshop was to bring together, for the first time, researchers and practitioners from various areas working on CQA. This workshop was specifically designed for the broad WWW audience. Yet, our goal was to also conduct a more focused discussion, and to consider the latest work in progress in the area of Community Question Answering. Process: We issued a call for papers and requested the assistance of a Program Committee of 11 renowned experts to carefully review the paper submissions. They are listed on the next page. We are deeply grateful to all of them for their thorough and insightful reviews. Themes: The themes of our workshop call for papers were diverse and included topics such as question routing, question recommendation, spam and abuse detection techniques, personalization and recommendation, user modeling, monetization, and connections of CQA with search, evaluation, and social network research. The papers that were accepted by our Program Committee could be clustered around 4 main areas: (1) quality (2) routing (3) discovery and (4) users. In addition, Sep Kamvar, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and the Director of the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, agreed to open the workshop as our keynote speaker and discuss Language, Thought and Community Question Answering. We hope that you will find the workshop interesting and thought provoking. Our goal was not only to provide the opportunity for researchers and practitioners in the Web community to share ideas, but also to foster new research and innovation in the fascinating field of CQA. The Official Web site of the workshop is http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/cqa2012