English versus Chinese : A cross-lingual study of community question answering sites

This paper conducts a cross-lingual study across six community question answering sites (CQAs) from two popular languages used on the internet, English and Chinese. The CQAs from the two languages are compared on the basis of three perspectives, namely, answer quality, answer responsiveness, and corpus comprehensiveness. Results indicate that there exist no statistically significant differences between the English CQAs and the Chinese CQAs in terms of answer quality. However, English CQAs appear to fare better in terms of answer responsiveness, whereas Chinese CQAs seem to perform better in terms of corpus comprehensiveness. The implications of the findings are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with notes on limitations and future work.