An intelligent human-expert forum system based on fuzzy information retrieval technique

The forum system is useful for sharing knowledge and help-seeking. However, existing forums often have the problem that some questions remain unanswered. This study proposes an intelligent human-expert forum system to perform more efficient knowledge sharing. The system uses fuzzy information retrieval techniques to discover important discussion knowledge and actively invites human-experts who might be capable of answering the question to participate in the discussion. The selection of human-experts employs the Expert-Terms Correlation Matrix, which stores the knowledge strength of human-experts. Moreover, the forgetting curve is adopted into our forum system for modeling the variations in memory strength. The experiment uses three different categories of discussions to be the testing data, and the performance study shows acceptable results on discussion searching and expert discovery. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.