Question: Is there any obvious difference between the open and the answered questions.？
Evidence: In this section, we identify various linguistic activities on Quora and propose quantifications of the language usage patterns in this Q&A site. In particular, we show that there exists significant differences in the linguistic structure of the open and the answered questions. Note that most of the measures that we define are simple, intuitive and can be easily obtained automatically from the data (without manual intervention). Therefore the framework is practical, inexpensive and highly scalable.
Content of a question text is important to attract people and make them engage more toward it. The linguistic structure (i.e., the usage of POS tags, the use of Out-of-Vocabulary words, character usage etc.) one adopts are key factors for answerability of questions. We shall discuss the linguistic structure that often represents the writing style of a question asker.
In fig 1 (a), we observe that askers of open questions generally use more no. of words compared to answered questions. To understand the nature of words (standard English words or chat-like words frequently used in social media) used in the text, we compare the words with GNU Aspell dictionary to see whether they are present in the dictionary or not. We observe that both open questions and answered questions follow similar distribution (see fig 1 (b)). Part-of-Speech (POS) tags are indicators of grammatical aspects of texts. To observe how the Part-of-Speech tags are distributed in the question texts, we define a diversity metric. We use the standard CMU POS tagger BIBREF8 for identifying the POS tags of the constituent words in the question. We define the POS tag diversity (POSDiv) of a question $q_i$ as follows: $POSDiv(q_i) = -\sum _{j \in pos_{set}}p_j\times \log (p_j)$ where $p_j$ is the probability of the $j^{th}$ POS in the set of POS tags. Fig 1 (c) shows that the answered questions have lower POS tag diversity compared to open questions. Question texts undergo several edits so that their readability and the engagement toward them are enhanced. It is interesting to identify how far such edits can make the question different from the original version of it. To capture this phenomena, we have adopted ROUGE-LCS recall BIBREF9 from the domain of text summarization. Higher the recall value, lesser are the changes in the question text. From fig 1 (d), we observe that open questions tend to have higher recall compared to the answered ones which suggests that they have not gone through much of text editing thus allowing for almost no scope of readability enhancement.
Psycholinguistic analysis: 
The way an individual talks or writes, give us clue to his/her linguistic, emotional, and cognitive states. A question asker's linguistic, emotional, cognitive states are also revealed through the language he/she uses in the question text. In order to capture such psycholinguistic aspects of the asker, we use Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) BIBREF10 that analyzes various emotional, cognitive, and structural components present in individuals' written texts. LIWC takes a text document as input and outputs a score for the input for each of the LIWC categories such as linguistic (part-of-speech of the words, function words etc.) and psychological categories (social, anger, positive emotion, negative emotion, sadness etc.) based on the writing style and psychometric properties of the document. In table 1 , we perform a comparative analysis of the asker's psycholinguistic state while asking an open question and an answered question.
Askers of open questions use more function words, impersonal pronouns, articles on an average whereas asker of answered questions use more personal pronouns, conjunctions and adverbs to describe their questions. Essentially, open questions lack content words compared to answered questions which, in turn, affects the readability of the question. As far as the psychological aspects are concerned, answered question askers tend to use more social, family, human related words on average compared to an open question asker. The open question askers express more positive emotions whereas the answered question asker tend to express more negative emotions in their texts. Also, answered question askers are more emotionally involved and their questions reveal higher usage of anger, sadness, anxiety related words compared to that of open questions. Open questions, on the other hand, contains more sexual, body, health related words which might be reasons why they do not attract answers.
In table 2 , we show a collection of examples of open questions to illustrate that many of the above quantities based on the linguistic activities described in this section naturally correspond to the factors that human judges consider responsible for a question remaining unanswered. This is one of the prime reasons why these quantities qualify as appropriate indicators of answerability.
In particular, we show that there exists significant differences in the linguistic structure of the open and the answered questions.
Answer: Yes, there are significant differences in the linguistic structure of the open and the answered questions.