Posting Recommendations in Healthcare Q&A Forums

Online Q&A forums, unlike search engines, allow posting of various types of queries, thus attracting users to seek information and solve problems in specific domains. However, as insufficient knowledge leads to incomprehensible queries, unsuitable responses are common. We develop posting recommendation systems (RSs) to support users in composing reasonable posts and receiving effective answers. The posting RSs were evaluated by a user study containing 27 participants and three tasks to examine if users engaged more in the question generation process. Two medical experts were recruited to verify whether professionals can understand and answer posts supported by RSs. The results show that the proposed mechanism enables askers to produce posts with better understandability, which leads experts to devote more attention to answer their questions.