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A User-Oriented Model for Expert Finding

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6611))

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Abstract

Expert finding addresses the problem of retrieving a ranked list of people who are knowledgeable on a given topic. Several models have been proposed to solve this task, but so far these have focused solely on returning the most knowledgeable people as experts on a particular topic. In this paper we argue that in a real-world organizational setting the notion of the “best expert” also depends on the individual user and her needs. We propose a user-oriented approach that balances two factors that influence the user’s choice: time to contact an expert, and the knowledge value gained after. We use the distance between the user and an expert in a social network to estimate contact time, and consider various social graphs, based on organizational hierarchy, geographical location, and collaboration, as well as the combination of these. Using a realistic test set, created from interactions of employees with a university-wide expert search engine, we demonstrate substantial improvements over a state-of-the-art baseline on all retrieval measures.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée, France

    Elena Smirnova

  2. ISLA, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Krisztian Balog

Authors
  1. Elena Smirnova
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  2. Krisztian Balog
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information School, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, S1 4DP, Sheffield, UK

    Paul Clough

  2. CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Colum Foley , Cathal Gurrin  & Hyowon Lee ,  & 

  3. Centre for Next Generation Localisation, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Gareth J. F. Jones

  4. TNO Human Factors, Brassersplein 2, 2612 CT, Delft, The Netherlands

    Wessel Kraaij

  5. Yahoo! Research, 177 Diagonal, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Vanessa Mudoch

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Smirnova, E., Balog, K. (2011). A User-Oriented Model for Expert Finding. In: Clough, P., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_58

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_58

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20160-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20161-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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