Cognos: crowdsourcing search for topic experts in microblogs

Finding topic experts on microblogging sites with millions of users, such as Twitter, is a hard and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose and investigate a new methodology for discovering topic experts in the popular Twitter social network. Our methodology relies on the wisdom of the Twitter crowds – it leverages Twitter Lists, which are often carefully curated by individual users to include experts on topics that interest them and whose meta-data (List names and descriptions) provides valuable semantic cues to the experts’ domain of expertise. We mined List information to build Cognos, a system for finding topic experts in Twitter. Detailed experimental evaluation based on a real-world deployment shows that: (a) Cognos infers a user’s expertise more accurately and comprehensively than state-of-the-art systems that rely on the user’s bio or tweet content, (b) Cognos scales well due to built-in mechanisms to efficiently update its experts’ database with new users, a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Saptarshi Ghosh, Naveen Kumar Sharma, Fabrício Benevenuto, Niloy Ganguly, P. Krishna Gummadi
• Keywords: Information Services Web, Information Technology, Line Information Services, SIGIR 2012, Topic Experts