Expert Finding - Academia vs. Practice
This event took place on Wednesday 09 January 2008 at 11:30
Thijs Westerveld Teezir search solutions
With the start of an enterprise search track at TREC in 2005, the search for topical expertise has recently received quite some attention in the academic world. The practical value of an expert finding system is evident. Connecting people to interact and share their knowledge is widely recognised as an important factor in the successful operation of an enterprise or organisation. In this talk I will start to outline the field of expert finding from these two perspectives. I will discuss the
set-up of expert finding task as organized by TREC's expert finding track as well as the practical usefulness of such systems. The second part of the talk will focus on previous work I did in the context of the TREC benchmarks. Typically, expert finding systems follow one of two approaches. Either they build profiles for candidate experts based on the documents associated to them and ranking the profiles, or they create a document ranking aggregate document scores into person scores based on the person-document associations. I will discuss an approach that is somehow in between these two approaches and produces two document rankings, one topic based and one person based. The correlation between topical document ranking and personal document ranking is taken as an indication of the person's expertise. Finally, I will highlight the differences between the academic evaluation of expert finding and the real life situations as we find them in practice.
This event took place on Wednesday 09 January 2008 at 11:30
With the start of an enterprise search track at TREC in 2005, the search for topical expertise has recently received quite some attention in the academic world. The practical value of an expert finding system is evident. Connecting people to interact and share their knowledge is widely recognised as an important factor in the successful operation of an enterprise or organisation. In this talk I will start to outline the field of expert finding from these two perspectives. I will discuss the
set-up of expert finding task as organized by TREC's expert finding track as well as the practical usefulness of such systems. The second part of the talk will focus on previous work I did in the context of the TREC benchmarks. Typically, expert finding systems follow one of two approaches. Either they build profiles for candidate experts based on the documents associated to them and ranking the profiles, or they create a document ranking aggregate document scores into person scores based on the person-document associations. I will discuss an approach that is somehow in between these two approaches and produces two document rankings, one topic based and one person based. The correlation between topical document ranking and personal document ranking is taken as an indication of the person's expertise. Finally, I will highlight the differences between the academic evaluation of expert finding and the real life situations as we find them in practice.
Future Internet
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Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
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