Quora is one of the most popular community Q&A sites of recent times.
However, many question posts on this Q&A site often do not get answered. In
this paper, we quantify various linguistic activities that discriminates an
answered question from an unanswered one. Our central finding is that the way
users use language while writing the question text can be a very effective
means to characterize answerability. This characterization helps us to predict
early if a question remaining unanswered for a specific time period t will
eventually be answered or not and achieve an accuracy of 76.26% (t = 1 month)
and 68.33% (t = 3 months). Notably, features representing the language use
patterns of the users are most discriminative and alone account for an accuracy
of 74.18%. We also compare our method with some of the similar works (Dror et
al., Yang et al.) achieving a maximum improvement of ~39% in terms of accuracy.Comment: 1 figure, 3 tables, ICWSM 2017 as poste
