Empirical study on overlapping community detection in question and answer sites

Abstract

In many social networks, people interact based on their interests. Community detection algorithms are then useful to reveal the sub-structures of a network and help us find interest groups. Identifying these social communities can bring benefit to understanding and predicting users behaviors. However, for some kind of online community sites such as question-and-answer (Q&A) sites or forums, there is no friendship based social network structure, which means people are not aware who they are in contact with. Therefore, many traditional community detection techniques do not apply directly. In this paper, we propose an empirical approach for extracting data from Q&A sites suitable to apply community detection methods. Then we compare three kinds of community detection methods we applied on a dataset extracted from the popular Q&A site StackOverflow. We analyze and comment the results of each method.