Dependency Graph Based Detection of Semantically Equivalent Questions in Online Forums

In the present, people increasingly rely on online user forums for clearing their doubts and seeking answers to varied questions. On many online forums, users encounter a similar question asked in different formats. This results in confusion for the user and he may not be able to find appropriate answer to his question even though the appropriate answer exists on some other page, i.e., on the page resultant of a differently formed question. Currently, online forums like Quora only give suggestions to the user about the questions he could ask but do not show all the semantically equivalent questions. This article eases the work of the users searching for answers on online user forums. The proposed technique will allow the users to look at all the existing semantically equivalent questions. A dependency graph-based matching algorithm is applied to accomplish this objective.