Predicting the quality of questions on Stackoverflow

Community Question Answering websites (CQA) have a growing popularity as a way of providing and searching of information. CQA attract users as they provide a direct and rapid way to find the desired information. As recognizing good questions can improve the CQA services and the user’s experience, the current study focuses on question quality instead. Specifically, we predict question quality and investigate the features which influence it. The influence of the question tags, length of the question title and body, presence of a code snippet, the user reputation and terms used to formulate the question are tested. For each set of dependent variables, Ridge regression models are estimated. The results indicate that the inclusion of terms in the models improves their predictive power. Additionally, we investigate which lexical terms determine high and low quality questions. The terms with the highest and lowest coefficients are semantically analyzed. The analysis shows that terms predicting high quality are terms expressing, among others, excitement, negative experience or terms regarding exceptions. Terms predicting low quality questions are terms containing spelling errors or indicating off-topic questions and interjections.