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
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Social Software is...

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.
Check out these Hot Social Software Projects:
List all Social Software Projects
Check out these Hot Social Software Technologies:
List all Social Software Technologies
List all Social Software Projects
Check out these Hot Social Software Technologies:
List all Social Software Technologies



