Non-local evidence for expert finding

The task addressed in this paper, finding experts in an enterprise setting, has gained in importance and interest over the past few years. Commonly, this task is approached as an association finding exercise between people and topics. Existing techniques use either documents (as a whole) or proximity-based techniques to represent candidate experts. Proximity-based techniques have shown clear precision-enhancing benefits. We complement both document and proximity-based approaches to expert finding by importing global evidence of expertise, i.e., evidence obtained using information that is not available in the immediate proximity of a candidate expert's name occurrence or even on the same page on which the name occurs. Examples include candidate priors, query models, as well as other documents a candidate expert is associated with. Using the CERC data set created for the TREC 2007 Enterprise track we identify examples of non-local evidence of expertise. We then propose modified exp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Krisztian Balog, Maarten de Rijke
• Keywords: Candidate Expert, CIKM 2008, Information Management, Non-local Evidence, Proximity-based Techniques