Patent Document ID: 9292597
Application ID: 14061804

Base Claim:
1. A method for identifying at least one prospect answerer for a question on a question-answer (QA) forum, the method comprising: accessing, by one or more processors of a computing system, QA forum activity associated with users of a QA forum, wherein the QA forum activity contains historical questions, historical answers, and profiles, each having elements including QA forum information, and wherein the QA forum activity is associated with users of one or a combination of the QA forum and other QA forums; accessing, by one or more processors of the computing system, historical online social activity corresponding to the users of the QA forum, each historical online social activity having elements including at least social activity information; determining, by one or more processors of the computing system, based on performing a first similarity calculation, a similarity between elements of a question on the QA forum, and the elements of the QA forum activity associated with each of the users of the QA forum and the elements of the historical online social activity corresponding to each of the users of the QA forum; selecting, by one or more processors of the computing system, based on results of the first similarity calculation, at least one user of the QA forum as an at least one model answerer, wherein elements associated with and corresponding to the at least one model answerer are similar to the elements of the question; determining, by one or more processors of the computing system, based on performing a second similarity calculation, a similarity between the elements associated with and corresponding to each of the users of the QA forum other than the at least one model answerer, and the elements associated with and corresponding to the at least one model answerer; and identifying, by one or more processors of the computing system, based on results of the second similarity calculation, at least one prospect answerer amongst the users of the QA forum, wherein elements associated with and corresponding to the at least one prospect answerer are similar to the elements associated with and corresponding to the at least one model answerer.

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Claim 5:
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein determining, based on performing the first similarity calculation, the similarity between the elements of the question on the QA forum and the elements of the QA forum activity associated with each of the users of the QA forum and the elements of the historical online social activity corresponding with each of the users of the QA forum, comprises: determining, by one or more processors of the computing system, an ability of a user to answer the question of the QA forum based at least in part, on a number of questions answered, a number of best answers provided, and a topic of each question answered; determining, by one or more processors of the computing system, the willingness of the user to answer the question based at least in part on the number of questions answered by the user and the number of best answers provided by the user and a number of events of posting, commenting, and tagging on non-QA social media sites; and determining, by one or more processors of the computing system, the readiness of the user to answer the question based at least in part, on an availability status of the user, a number of questions routed to the user, and a workload of the user.