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Does everybody lie? characterizing answerers in health-related CQA
The study described in the paper aims at multi-faceted characterization of active community question answering (CQA) users who provide answers to health-related questions. The study employs various research techniques - both qualitative (surveys) and quantitative. With two online surveys we get insights into 1. perception of online health-related information and its use by patients by medical professionals and 2. motivtion of most active CQA answerers, a significant share of which apparently constitute users with medical education. In the second series of experiments we apply topic modeling to a yearly collection of questions and answers from a popular Russian CQA servce in order to find users focused on a particular topic. Further, we attempt to find users with professional medical backround based on the lexis of their answers. The obtained results provide a beter understanding of motivation and backround of CQA users and can be used for the improvement of CQA services, as well as for solving problems such as CQA content quality evaluation, expert search, and question routing, etc.