Big Data Implementation Using Machine Learning on
Question and Answer Platform
(case study ngepo.com)
Sridhatu Sridhatu
Information Systems Management Department,
BGP-Master of Information Systems Management
Bina Nusantara University
Jakarta, Indonesia 11480
sridhatuyoshi@binus.edu
Abstract— Ngepo.com is a website-based question and answer
platform created by start-up Indonesia, so people can access the
website from various circles. Users of this website can send
questions to ask questions and add knowledge. The system can
automatically detect what topics match the questions sent by the
user and then will be answered by a particular field expert. This
website is growing more and more people are joining. Users and
data continue to increase every day so ngepo.com website system
must provide large enough data processing and store and
analyses data. Big Data refers to technologies and initiatives that
involve data that is so diverse, rapidly changing, or super-large
that it is too difficult for conventional technology, expertise, and
infrastructure to handle it effectively. Therefore, big data
implementation is required using machine learning on the
question and answer platform to help and improve the ease of
accessing this website to be more effective, and to analyses the
previous data to be able to create brilliant ideas or ideas for the
present and future.
Keywords— information and communication technology, big
data, machine learning, web API
I. INTRODUCTION
The fast growth of internet technology and online business
have delivered tremendous impacts to our life nowadays.
Study that have been done by Google and Temasek addressed
that as result of the growth of internet technology in Southeast
Asia, especially in Indonesia, has delivered online economy
growing faster than is predicted [1]. Both companies estimate
that internet users in Indonesia from 2015 to 2020, will
increase each year by 19%. It provides the insight that online
information is getting easier and faster to obtain. The fast
growth of Internet also provides the changing paradigm in
product transaction and life styles. The change in life style has
influences to the young generation in the use of social media.
Currently, the interaction amongst youngsters are dominated
with the use of social media.
The vast use of social media for connecting these
youngsters are sensed by several college students in creating
only startup in early January 2018, as known as Ngepo.com.
This site has claimed with fast growth of followers.
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2018 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)
Page 184
Gunawan Wang
Information Systems Management Department,
BGP-Master of Information Systems Management
Bina Nusantara University
Jakarta, Indonesia 11480
gwang@binus.edu
Ngepo.com is a website site that develops intelligent system in
question and answer form. With ngepo.com anyone who asks
questions on this system, then the system will display the
question only to people who have interest or have the ability to
answer it. Indirectly this system can bring together someone's
problem with the problem solver. Everyone must have basic
knowledge of each that is not the same as others as some
people like science and less interested in art, or vice versa.
Ngepo.com can help users to share their knowledge with other
users who have difficulty in certain areas that are not
mastered. Some obstacles encountered in which users are lazy
to enter the desired topic, then have to choose categories,
suppose the system is still manual input such as yahoo answer
website, the user must input the question, then the user is also
asked to input the topic and asked to input the question topic.
By utilizing big data, the topic chosen by the user can be
automatically generated.
With less than a year, since its launching, ngepo.com
already has 140 active users that spread within Indonesian
cities, and expected to grow consistently in various races and
generations. Frequently database and infrastructure updates
need to be done to catchup with increasing trends. The use of
big data and advance machine learning become necessary
tools to assist the growth the needs of users. The article
examines the role of both technologies to increase the
accuracy of the system and increase user satisfaction.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Advance Technology Growth.
Recent advance technology growth enables to enhance of
people skills to solve their problems. The role of information
processing becomes more advancing in identification,
manipulation and organizing or structuring of a group of data
and convert them into valuation information for the users [6].
That relevant information is expected to be more accurate and
real-time to be used for all stakeholders such as: personal use,
business, government and strategic information for decision
making.
 The essence of information processing can be defined as a
device-to-device technology, consisting of hardware, software,
processes and systems that is used to assist the communication
process. It enables to support effective communication in
timely response. Information and communication technology
(ICT) are defined as an electronic device consisting of
hardware and software and all activities related to the
processing, manipulation, management and transfer or transfer
of information among the media [6].
The current trends ICT such as the introduction of Big data
and machine learning, and combined with internet technology.
The growth of mobile devices triggers the growth of Big data
and machine learning exponentially. Scholars have addressed
the use of mobile devices and Internet technology has
increased the use of data either its volume and data types
significantly and tremendously in cyberspace [5]. It involves
creating various data types such as text, images or photos,
video and other form of data types that can be identified by the
computerized system.
By using big data, it helps and provides solution that can
be discussed timely, and its emergence is an effective solution
to manage the data growth over time, that has exceeded the
limit of media overruns and database systems [4].
Fig. 1. Characteristics of Big Data [17].
B. Big Data
Figure 1 summaries the 3 characteristics of big data such as:
(1) volume: the volume of data continues to increase over
time. Many factors rapidly increasing the data volumes,
including almost all business transactions involving data an
increasing number of unstructured data flowing from social
media, and increasing amounts of data generated from
machines and mobile devices. The data size determines values
and deep potential and whether it can actually be considered
big data or not [17]; (2) velocity: the velocity dimension refers
to Data flows at an unprecedented pace and this should be
handled in a timely manner. The use of RFID, sensor devices
and smart measuring devices in business activities drive the
need to handle such large data flows in real-time. Rapid
reactions to such swift data flows are challenges that the
organization must address. The type and nature of the data. It
helps people who analyze it is using effectively the in-depth
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2018 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)
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results. [17]; (3) variety: the data has various formats and
types. The data exist in the form of structured data and
unstructured data. Information is generated from business
applications used by organizations and involves structured
data or unstructured data. Managing, combining and managing
data that has a variety of formats and types is a challenge that
must be answered by the organization. In addition to
generating knowledge from large amounts of data it is
necessary to connect all data of various types and formats
[17].
D. Apache Hadoop
Hadoop is a Java-based and open source software framework
that works to process large distributed data and runs on a
cluster consisting of multiple connected computers (parallel
computing). Based on Hadoop can process large amounts of
data to petabytes (1 petabyte = 10245 bytes) and run over
hundreds or even thousands of computers. Hadoop made by
Doug Cutting which originally Hadoop is a sub project of
Nautch used for search engines. Hadoop is open source and is
under the banner of the Apache Software Foundation [18].
Core Hadoop has two main components; (1) Hadoop
Distributed File System (HDFS): self-healing, high-bandwidth
clustered storage, reliable, redundant, distributed file system
optimized for large files; (2) MapReduce: fault-tolerant
distributed processing, programming model for processing sets
of data Mapping inputs to outputs and reducing the output of
multiple Mappers to one (or a few) answers [19].
C. Machine Learning.
Machine learning is one of the disciplines of computer science
that studies how to make computers or machines with an
intelligence. To create intelligence system, the computer
system should have capability to learn. In other words,
machine learning is a scientific field that contains about
computer or machine learning to be smart [4].
In general, the learning process in machine learning is
divided into six part, namely: (1) supervised learning:
generates functions that map the input to the output; (2)
unsupervised learning: automatically modeling inputs without
guidance; (3) Semi-supervised Learning: supervised and
unsupervised combinations; (4) reinforcement learning: learns
a policy on how to act based on observations on the
environment; (5) transduction: practice predicting new output
based on training inputs, training outputs, and test inputs
available during the training process (learning); (6) learning to
learn: studying its own inductive bias based on experience.
Machine learning serves optimization criteria or groupings
by using sample data or past experiences. In machine learning,
it has a set of models connects to several parameters; and the
learning process is carried out through implementation of
computer programs to optimize model parameters using
training data or past experience. Machine learning used
statistical theory in constructing mathematical models, with
the core task to draw conclusions from the sample.
D. Latent Semantic Analysis
LSA is an automated mathematical/statistical technique for
extracting and inferring relations of expected contextual usage
of words in passages of discourse. It is not a traditional
program of natural language processing or artificial
intelligence program; LSA uses no humanly constructed
dictionaries, knowledge bases, semantic networks, grammars,
syntactic parsers, or morphologies, or the like, and takes as its
input only raw text parsed into words defined as unique
character strings and was born because it is based on the idea
that syntax and style alone are not sufficient to assess an essay
[20].
the ngepo system has wide range of coverage of popular topics
such as: technology, internet, computers, games, android,
lifestyle, business, opinion, health, relationships and social
life.
Before accessing the content, the user is expected to make
registration and when the process is completed, user can see
questions and previous answers posted by other users.
Figure 3 shows main page after the user login or register
into system. User membership is recorded into Hadoop data
system. Once the user logs in, he/she can only input
question(s) about the desired topic, and the topic will be
automatically generated on the system.

III. RESEARCH METHOD

Widyahapsari [1] defines the research method as a scientific

way of obtaining data with a specific purpose and usefulness".
She further elaborates the use of methodological research as
the means that regulate the research procedures in general, as
well as the implementation of science particularly. The use of
scientific procedure is expected to meet with research
objectives.
The article applies the qualitative approach with the
objectives to explore the data more comprehensively. The data
collection is not limited with number, but also comes from
multiple sources such as: interviews, focus group discussion,
observation, literature study and other relevant articles from
Fig. 3. User Login Page.
popular sources such as: IEEE, Association of Information
System (AIS), and Association Computing Machine (ACM). The more user interested with the system, he/she tends to
The outcome of the study is expected to illustrate the post more questions and get more reply. The large data
application of Big data and machine learning in addressing the processing system is required to accommodate the needs of
common question and answer platform that raised by the Q&A sessions. Current statistics shows the data has grown
users. The use of Big data and machine learning also is tremendously and can reach thousands of lines. The more
expected to address the needs of users and improve user visitor accesses into the system, and more data is generated.
experience in accessing ngepo.com. The Hadoop data system is used to manage the tremendous
growth of data. With the implementation of big data at
IV. DISCUSSION ngepo.com provides very useful and great benefits to this
system.

Fig. 4. Architecture of Ngepo.com with Hadoop.

Fig. 2. Ngepo.com.
The ngepo.com site is an interaction website that allows the
users to raise question and answer. Current users come from
range of ages starting from teenagers until seniors. Any users
can get validated answers through Q&A session. Currently,
Figure 4 illustrates the current Hadoop architecture system
with the API system. It allows connecting multiplatform data
to access the data. The API flow is the first authentication
mechanism to the API, after which it can only then get a token

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2018 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)
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to access the data and acts as a bridge before connecting it to
the database, which is needed in Hadoop data processing.
There are several stages in Hadoop data processing such
as: firstly, the use of tokenization mechanism in indexing the
document by converting all characters into lowercase and
deleting all punctuation. The process continues with
identifying the unique words with its frequency and make
weighting of the words. See the following diagram for the
illustration.
Figure 5 shows the entire punctuation is deleted, and each
word is broken down and resulting in a unique word. The
second stage of stop-word removal is a process of eliminating
words that often appears after the tokenization process.
Fig. 5. Tokenization Results.
The objective of this stage is to improve the quality of the
indexing. The third stage of stemming is processing and
separating multiple words into a single word, and arrange
them into form of matrix. It is illustrated as follow:
Fig. 6. Example of a figure caption. (fiBasic Words Matrix.
After stemming process is done, it is followed with
calculating frequency with statistical tool. Each incoming
question is compared with entire data that stored in the
database system. The example of incoming questions is shown
in following figure.
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2018 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)
Page 187
Fig. 7. Sample Question.
Figure 7 shows that question is sent by the user and the topic
is close to the question set by the system itself, without
inputting the topic manually. The system does self-selection
with statistics method and produce the following table.
The LSA method is used to find equations or grouping topics
(modelling topics). The ngepo system is used to calculate
proximity of content A with other content. Thus, the resulting
output is a score. For example A with B: 0.3737, A with C:
0.888 and so on. The higher the score it will be considered the
closer or similar content. If the content is the same then it is
considered to have the same topic as well. To compare content
A with other content (past content that already has a topic).
While the A content is the newly submitted content. So there
is no topic, from the results of this calculation it will be known
to go to which topic automatically. the content is the question
Fig. 8. Self-selection with statistical method.
Figure 8 shows the role of machine learning tasks that
examines the tasks from pre-existing or previous data by using
certain method, then get the output which is the score of all the
existing documents. Next five documents with the highest
score will be taken from the five documents the top three
topics were then taken. One document can have more than one
topic. After getting the topic approaching it will be entered
into the database automatically. So, the implementation of big
data in this system gives a big impact and benefits so that
users who access the web will be helpful and more effective.
V. CONCLUSION
Implementation of big data provides many benefits in the
field of technology, one of them on a question and answer
platform-based website ngepo.com. This website is present to
facilitate users from various circles who like to interact and
are curious to find a solution of ignorance or answer the
curiosity of a variety of simple problems in everyday
activities. Ngepo.com is a question and answer portal that
features social media features and topics that are currently
popular. Big data implementation using machine learning
provides a brilliant solution for startup in Indonesia, because
of the ease of accessing from social media, without the need to
manually input to select the topic to be asked, but the system
will do automatically. Furthermore, the benefits of big data
can analyze the data that already exist in the previous to get
ideas or ideas. Then become popular in the present for the
future in order to improve the convenience and satisfaction of
system users, that already exist in the previous to get ideas or
ideas. Then become popular in the present for the future in
order to improve the convenience and satisfaction of system
users.
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978-1-5386-5821-5/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 3-5 September 2018, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, Indonesia
2018 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)
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