The influence of the document ranking in expert search

Macdonald, C. and Ounis, I. (2011) The influence of the document ranking in expert search. Information Processing and Management, 47(3), pp. 376-390. (doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2010.09.004)

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Abstract

The retrieval effectiveness of the underlying document search component of an expert search engine can have an important impact on the effectiveness of the generated expert search results. In this large-scale study, we perform novel experiments in the context of the document search and expert search tasks of the TREC Enterprise track, to measure the influence that the performance of the document ranking has on the ranking of candidate experts. In particular, our experiments show that while the expert search system performance is related to the relevance of the retrieved documents, surprisingly, it is not always the case that increasing document search effectiveness causes an increase in expert search performance. Moreover, we simulate document rankings designed with expert search performance in mind and, through a failure analysis, show why even a perfect document ranking may not result in a perfect ranking of candidate experts.

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:Information Processing and Management
ISSN:0306-4573
Published Online:08 October 2010

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