34 IT Pro July/August 2015 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1520-9202/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE Simon Fong, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China Suzy Zhou, Mozat, Singapore Luiz Moutinho, University of Glasgow, Scotland Online community question answering (CQA) services have gained popularity among users wanting to voluntarily exchange solutions without a fee. This article proposes classification using text analytics to predict how likely a posted question is to be answered. A s a community-based knowledge-cre- ation service, 1 the community question an- swering (CQA) website model has risen in popularity over the past few years, es- pecially for topics requiring expert knowledge. CQA lets users easily post questions online for peers to answer voluntarily. The volume of questions an- swered on such sites is predicted to soon surpass those answered by library reference services. 2 In fact, CQA websites are perceived as more precise and trustworthy than traditional search engines 3 because answers come from users with real experi- ence who, in turn, are questioners themselves and expect the same quality in answers as they provide. CQA websites pertaining to computer program- ming in particular are gaining momentum among programmers and software developers. 4 IT tech- nologies evolve so rapidly that experienced devel- opers can’t be proficient in every aspect of IT. For example, the popular CQA programming website Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) lets developers post programming or IT-related ques- tions in the hope that experts can provide answers. By promoting good-quality Q&A and eliminating uninteresting questions, 5 CQA websites will likely prosper as they attract serious users. One concern, however, is the high number of unanswered questions on such websites. Re- searchers found that out of 76,251 questions on Yahoo Answers, 10,424 (about 13.67 percent) re- ceived no answers. 6 Similarly, 20 percent of ques- tions in Quora went unanswered, even though DATA ANALYTICS Text Analytics for Predicting Question Acceptance Rates