With an explosion in proliferation of user-generated content, the productivity of search is decreasing and quality of readily available online content is deteriorating. There is an increasing need for intelligent community based systems that can understand community conversations and proactively connect users together based on community information need and interests. We describe our approach based on modeling community utterances to proactively target the community for exchange of questions and answers. We envision a system that automatically encourages user engagement and participation by prompting questions and asking to suggest answers based on user’s and community activity levels. In this paper, we analyze health forum conversations from WebMD.com and learn to classify them in different speech acts using Verbal Response Modes (VRM) theory. We describe our approach for modeling an intelligent community to engage participants based on observations from our analysis.
