Using relevance feedback in expert search

Macdonald, C. and Ounis, I. (2007) Using relevance feedback in expert search. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4425, pp. 431-443. (doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_39)

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Publisher's URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_39

Abstract

In Enterprise settings, expert search is considered an important task. In this search task, the user has a need for expertise - for instance, they require assistance from someone about a topic of interest. An expert search system assists users with their "expertise need" by suggesting people with relevant expertise to the topic of interest. In this work, we apply an expert search approach that does not explicitly rank candidates in response to a query, but instead implicitly ranks candidates by taking into account a ranking of document with respect to the query topic. Pseudo-relevance feedback, aka query expansion, has been shown to improve retrieval performance in adhoc search tasks. In this work, we investigate to which extent query expansion can be applied in an expert search task to improve the accuracy of the generated ranking of candidates. We define two approaches for query expansion, one based on the initial of ranking of documents for the query topic. The second approach is based on the final ranking of candidates. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to determine if query expansion can be successfully applied in the expert search task, and secondly, to ascertain if either of the two forms of query expansion can provide robust, improved retrieval performance. We perform a thorough evaluation contrasting the two query expansion approaches in the context of the TREC 2005 and 2006 Enterprise tracks.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Macdonald, Professor Craig and Ounis, Professor Iadh
Authors: Macdonald, C., and Ounis, I.
Subjects:Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
Journal Name:Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher:Springer
ISSN:1611-3349
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2007 Springer
First Published:First published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4425:431-443
Publisher Policy:Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.

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