Although collaborative searching is not supported by mainstream search engines, recent research has highlighted the inherently collaborative nature of many Web search tasks. In this article, we describe HeyStaks, a collaborative Web search framework that is designed to complement mainstream search engines. At search time, HeyStaks learns from the search activities of other users and leverages this information to generate recommendations based on results that others have found relevant for similar searches. The key contribution of this article is to extend the HeyStaks social search model by considering the search expertise, or reputation, of HeyStaks users and using this information to enhance the result recommendation process. In particular, we propose a reputation model for HeyStaks users that utilise the implicit collaboration events that take place between users as recommendations are made and selected. We describe a live-user trial of HeyStaks that demonstrates the relevance of its core recommendations and the ability of the reputation model to further improve recommendation quality. Our findings indicate that incorporating reputation into the recommendation process further improves the relevance of HeyStaks recommendations by up to 40%.

@article{mcnally2011study, author = {McNally, Kevin and O'Mahony, Michael P. and Coyle, Maurice and Briggs, Peter and Smyth, Barry}, title = {A Case Study of Collaboration and Reputation in Social Web Search}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2011}, volume = {3}, number = {1}, pages = {4:1--4:29}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2036264.2036268}, doi = {10.1145/2036264.2036268}, issn = {2157-6904}, keywords = {collaborative, heystaks, reputation, search, social, web}, abstract = {Although collaborative searching is not supported by mainstream search engines, recent research has highlighted the inherently collaborative nature of many Web search tasks. In this article, we describe HeyStaks, a collaborative Web search framework that is designed to complement mainstream search engines. At search time, HeyStaks learns from the search activities of other users and leverages this information to generate recommendations based on results that others have found relevant for similar searches. The key contribution of this article is to extend the HeyStaks social search model by considering the search expertise, or reputation, of HeyStaks users and using this information to enhance the result recommendation process. In particular, we propose a reputation model for HeyStaks users that utilise the implicit collaboration events that take place between users as recommendations are made and selected. We describe a live-user trial of HeyStaks that demonstrates the relevance of its core recommendations and the ability of the reputation model to further improve recommendation quality. Our findings indicate that incorporating reputation into the recommendation process further improves the relevance of HeyStaks recommendations by up to 40%.} }

%0 = article %A = McNally, Kevin and O'Mahony, Michael P. and Coyle, Maurice and Briggs, Peter and Smyth, Barry %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2011 %I = ACM %T = A Case Study of Collaboration and Reputation in Social Web Search %U = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2036264.2036268

While web search tasks are often inherently collaborative in nature, many search engines do not explicitly support collaboration during search. In this paper, we describe HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com), a system that provides a novel approach to collaborative web search. Designed to work with mainstream search engines such as Google, HeyStaks supports searchers by harnessing the experiences of others as the basis for result recommendations. Moreover, a key contribution of our work is to propose a reputation system for HeyStaks to model the value of individual searchers from a result recommendation perspective. In particular, we propose an algorithm to calculate reputation directly from user search activity and we provide encouraging results for our approach based on a preliminary analysis of user activity and reputation scores across a sample of HeyStaks users.

@inproceedings{mcnally2010towards, author = {McNally, Kevin and O'Mahony, Michael P. and Smyth, Barry and Coyle, Maurice and Briggs, Peter}, title = {Towards a reputation-based model of social web search}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2010}, pages = {179--188}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1719970.1719996}, doi = {10.1145/1719970.1719996}, isbn = {978-1-60558-515-4}, keywords = {collaborative, heystaks, reputation, search, social, web}, abstract = {While web search tasks are often inherently collaborative in nature, many search engines do not explicitly support collaboration during search. In this paper, we describe HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com), a system that provides a novel approach to collaborative web search. Designed to work with mainstream search engines such as Google, HeyStaks supports searchers by harnessing the experiences of others as the basis for result recommendations. Moreover, a key contribution of our work is to propose a reputation system for HeyStaks to model the value of individual searchers from a result recommendation perspective. In particular, we propose an algorithm to calculate reputation directly from user search activity and we provide encouraging results for our approach based on a preliminary analysis of user activity and reputation scores across a sample of HeyStaks users.} }

%0 = inproceedings %A = McNally, Kevin and O'Mahony, Michael P. and Smyth, Barry and Coyle, Maurice and Briggs, Peter %B = Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2010 %I = ACM %T = Towards a reputation-based model of social web search %U = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1719970.1719996

The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content sites based on user contributions -social media sites - becomes increasingly important. Social media in general exhibit a rich variety of information sources: in addition to the content itself, there is a wide array of non-content information available, such as links between items and explicit quality ratings from members of the community. In this paper we investigate methods for exploiting such community feedback to automatically identify high quality content. As a test case, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large community question/answering portal that is particularly rich in the amount and types of content and social interactions available in it. We introduce a general classification framework for combining the evidence from different sources of information, that can be tuned automatically for a given social media type and quality definition. In particular, for the community question/answering domain, we show that our system is able to separate high-quality items from the rest with an accuracy close to that of humans

@inproceedings{agichtein2008finding, author = {Agichtein, Eugene and Castillo, Carlos and Donato, Debora and Gionis, Aristides and Mishne, Gilad}, title = {Finding high-quality content in social media}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2008}, pages = {183--194}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1341531.1341557}, doi = {10.1145/1341531.1341557}, isbn = {978-1-59593-927-2}, keywords = {answering, collaborative, media, quality, question, reputation, search, social, web}, abstract = {The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content sites based on user contributions --social media sites -- becomes increasingly important. Social media in general exhibit a rich variety of information sources: in addition to the content itself, there is a wide array of non-content information available, such as links between items and explicit quality ratings from members of the community. In this paper we investigate methods for exploiting such community feedback to automatically identify high quality content. As a test case, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large community question/answering portal that is particularly rich in the amount and types of content and social interactions available in it. We introduce a general classification framework for combining the evidence from different sources of information, that can be tuned automatically for a given social media type and quality definition. In particular, for the community question/answering domain, we show that our system is able to separate high-quality items from the rest with an accuracy close to that of humans} }

%0 = inproceedings %A = Agichtein, Eugene and Castillo, Carlos and Donato, Debora and Gionis, Aristides and Mishne, Gilad %B = Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2008 %I = ACM %T = Finding high-quality content in social media %U = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1341531.1341557

In this paper, we propose a user reputation model and apply it to a user-interactive question answering system. It combines the social network analysis approach and the user rating approach. Social network analysis is applied to analyze the impact of participant users' relations to their reputations. User rating is used to acquire direct judgment of a user's reputation based on other users' experiences with this user. Preliminary experiments show that the computed reputations based on our proposed reputation model can reflect the actual reputations of the simulated roles and therefore can fit in well with our user-interactive question answering system. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

@article{chen2007reputation, author = {Chen, Wei and Zeng, Qingtian and Wenyin, Liu and Hao, Tianyong}, title = {A user reputation model for a user-interactive question answering system}, journal = {Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience}, publisher = {John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.}, year = {2007}, volume = {19}, number = {15}, pages = {2091--2103}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1142}, doi = {10.1002/cpe.1142}, issn = {1532-0634}, keywords = {answering, collaborative, question, reputation, search, social, web}, abstract = {In this paper, we propose a user reputation model and apply it to a user-interactive question answering system. It combines the social network analysis approach and the user rating approach. Social network analysis is applied to analyze the impact of participant users' relations to their reputations. User rating is used to acquire direct judgment of a user's reputation based on other users' experiences with this user. Preliminary experiments show that the computed reputations based on our proposed reputation model can reflect the actual reputations of the simulated roles and therefore can fit in well with our user-interactive question answering system. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.} }

%0 = article %A = Chen, Wei and Zeng, Qingtian and Wenyin, Liu and Hao, Tianyong %D = 2007 %I = John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. %T = A user reputation model for a user-interactive question answering system %U = http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1142

Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are quickly becoming rich sources of knowledge on many topics which are not well served by general web search engines. Unfortunately, the quality of the submitted answers is uneven, ranging from excellent detailed answers to snappy and insulting remarks or even advertisements for commercial content. Furthermore, user feedback for many topics is sparse, and can be insufficient to reliably identify good answers from the bad ones. Hence, estimating the authority of users is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking, spam detection, and incentive mechanism design. We present an analysis of the link structure of a general-purpose question answering community to discover authoritative users, and promising experimental results over a dataset of more than 3 million answers from a popular community QA site. We also describe structural differences between question topics that correlate with the success of link analysis for authority discovery.

@inproceedings{jurczyk2007discovering, author = {Jurczyk, Pawel and Agichtein, Eugene}, title = {Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2007}, pages = {919--922}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1321440.1321575}, doi = {10.1145/1321440.1321575}, isbn = {978-1-59593-803-9}, keywords = {answering, collaborative, quality, question, reputation, search, social, web}, abstract = {Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are quickly becoming rich sources of knowledge on many topics which are not well served by general web search engines. Unfortunately, the quality of the submitted answers is uneven, ranging from excellent detailed answers to snappy and insulting remarks or even advertisements for commercial content. Furthermore, user feedback for many topics is sparse, and can be insufficient to reliably identify good answers from the bad ones. Hence, estimating the authority of users is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking, spam detection, and incentive mechanism design. We present an analysis of the link structure of a general-purpose question answering community to discover authoritative users, and promising experimental results over a dataset of more than 3 million answers from a popular community QA site. We also describe structural differences between question topics that correlate with the success of link analysis for authority discovery.} }

%0 = inproceedings %A = Jurczyk, Pawel and Agichtein, Eugene %B = Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2007 %I = ACM %T = Discovering authorities in question answer communities by using link analysis %U = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1321440.1321575

Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. Social mechanisms complement hard security techniques (such as passwords and digital certificates), which only guarantee that a party is authenticated and authorized, but do not ensure that it exercises its authorization in a way that is desirable to others. Social mechanisms are even more important when trusted third parties are not available. Our specific approach to reputation management leads to a decentralized society in which agents help each other weed out undesirable players.

@incollection{yu2000social, author = {Yu, Bin and Singh, Munindar}, title = {A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities}, editor = {Klusch, Matthias and Kerschberg, Larry}, booktitle = {Cooperative Information Agents IV - The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, year = {2000}, volume = {1860}, pages = {355--393}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45012-2_15}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-540-45012-2_15}, isbn = {978-3-540-67703-1}, keywords = {collaborative, community, management, network, quality, reputation, search, social, trust, web}, abstract = {Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. Social mechanisms complement hard security techniques (such as passwords and digital certificates), which only guarantee that a party is authenticated and authorized, but do not ensure that it exercises its authorization in a way that is desirable to others. Social mechanisms are even more important when trusted third parties are not available. Our specific approach to reputation management leads to a decentralized society in which agents help each other weed out undesirable players.} }

%0 = incollection %A = Yu, Bin and Singh, Munindar %B = Cooperative Information Agents IV - The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace %C = Berlin/Heidelberg %D = 2000 %I = Springer %T = A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities %U = http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45012-2_15