Duplicate Question Detection using Online Learning

An integral part the learning experiences for both on-campus and off-campus courses are online communities such as Piazza. Piazza is described as a "Q&A" forum which is created for every class. An integral part of many online communities is the concept of "voting" to determine popular and useful information. However in many class orientated forums, this feature is not emphasised as post relevance tends to change relative to course assessments. Creating a way to understand quality posts can be beneficial for students and instructors, as it will reduce the clutter in the community by allow students to "see" important posts in the follow up section of different threads and for instructors to identify potential experts and teaching assistant candidates for future classes.

In this project, we aim to develop suitable approach for understanding quality of posts through introducing online machine learning techniques to assist with reducing clutter within young online communities.