LOCI: A Mobile Q&A System with Multimodal Motivation Scheme for Local Intent Questions in Dynamic Social Networks

Recent research has shown that people are frequently searching for information with local intent. The existing systems fail to answer this class of questions as they are not mainly designed to handle it. In this paper, we propose LOCI, a mobile question & answer system with a multimodal motivation scheme for local intent questions where users provide timely and accurate answers in a dynamic social network. LOCI mines users' shared and contextual information to identify the most relevant users for each question. The proposed multimodal motivation scheme exploits users' social ties and monetary rewards to raise their basic motivation levels. LOCI assigns questions to the best answerers via our three proposed algorithms: (i) LOCI-RT, which immediately assigns newly arrived questions/users to available users/questions, (ii) LOCI-LO, which uses short-time batches for locally optimal questions-users assignment, and (iii) LOCI-AD, which assigns short- and long-deadline questions immediately and via batching, respectively. We conduct: (i) a survey to support our assumptions regarding the proposed multimodal motivation scheme, and (ii) trace-driven experiments to evaluate the performance of the three proposed LOCI's algorithms.