On perfect document rankings for expert search

Macdonald, C. and Ounis, I. (2009) On perfect document rankings for expert search. Proceedings of the 32nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 740-741.

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Abstract

Expert search systems often employ a document search component to identify on-topic documents, which are then used to identify people likely to have relevant expertise. This work investigates the impact of the retrieval effectiveness of the underlying document search component. It has been previously shown that applying techniques to the underlying document search component that normally improve the effectiveness of a document search engine also have a positive impact on the retrieval effectiveness of the expert search engine. In this work, we experiment with fictitious perfect document rankings, to attempt to identify an upper-bound in expert search system performance. Our surprising results infer that non-relevant documents can bring useful expertise evidence, and that removing these does not lead to an upper-bound in retrieval performance.

Item Type:Articles
Keywords:Expert search, perfect ranking, evaluation
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:Proceedings of the 32nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Publisher:ACM

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