More or better: On trade-offs in compacting textual problem solution repositories

In this paper, we look into the problem of filtering problem solution repositories (from sources such as community-driven question answering systems) to render them more suitable for usage in knowledge reuse systems. We explore harnessing the fuzzy nature of usability of a solution to a problem, for such compaction. Fuzzy usabilities lead to several challenges; notably, the trade-off between choosing generic or better solutions. We develop an approach that can heed to a user specification of the trade-off between these criteria and introduce several quality measures based on fuzzy usability estimates to ascertain the quality of a problem-solution repository for usage in a Case Based Reasoning system. We establish, through a detailed empirical analysis, that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on virtually all quality measures. © 2011 ACM.