  Presented herein is a novel model for similar question ranking within
collaborative question answer platforms. The presented approach integrates a
regression stage to relate topics derived from questions to those derived from
question-answer pairs. This helps to avoid problems caused by the differences
in vocabulary used within questions and answers, and the tendency for questions
to be shorter than answers. The performance of the model is shown to outperform
translation methods and topic modelling (without regression) on several
real-world datasets.
