Cooperation, Interaction, Search: Computational Approaches to the Psychology of Asking and Answering Questions

This chapter argues that question-asking should be studied as a process of interactive search between social agents, and shows how new tools in machine learning, combined with large-scale data sets on question-asking ``in the wild'', can give us new insights into how it works beyond the confines of the laboratory. We introduce the technical aspects of these tools, new mathematical frameworks that can use them to gain insights into psychology of asking and answering questions, an examples of their application to the online forums Stack Exchange and Mumsnet, and archives of crosswords and quiz questions. We draw attention to the accompanying challenges, including the difficulty of using metadata as dependent variables, and determining the construct validity of the tools themselves.