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 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein performing the second similarity calculation further comprises: performing, by one or more processors of the computing system, a supervised metric learning technique for a question type to produce one or more similarity constraints used to determine a distance between each element associated with each user of the QA forum and a corresponding element of the at least one model answerer.