A Comparison of Quality, Speed, Scope and Usability between English and Chinese CQAs

Abstract

This paper compares CQAs from two popular languages used on the internet, English and Chinese, on the basis of four dimensions, namely, answer quality, answer speed, corpus scope and interface usability. To enhance granularity, answers are compared separately in terms of their content quality, cognitive quality and socio-emotional quality. Results indicate that the English CQAs fared better than the Chinese CQAs in terms of answer quality and answer speed, while the Chinese CQAs outperformed the English counterparts in terms of corpus scope and interface usability. However, the English CQAs and the Chinese CQAs did not differ significantly in terms of content quality of answers. The implications of the findings are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with notes on limitations and directions for future research.