Usefulness of click-through data in expert search

Macdonald, C. and White, R.W. (2009) Usefulness of click-through data in expert search. In: 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, Boston, USA, 19-23 Jul 2009, pp. 816-817. (doi: 10.1145/1571941.1572143)

Abstract

The task in expert finding is to identify members of an organisation with relevant expertise on a given topic. Typically, an expert search engine uses evidence from the authors of on-topic documents found in the organisation's intranet by search engines. The search result click-through behaviour of many intranet search engine users provides an additional source of evidence to identify topically-relevant documents, and via document authorship, experts. In this poster, we assess the usefulness of click-through log data for expert finding. We find that ranking authors based solely on the clicks their documents receive is reasonably effective at correctly identifying relevant experts. Moreover, we show that this evidence can successfully be integrated with an existing expert search engine to increase its retrieval effectiveness.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Macdonald, Professor Craig
• Authors: Macdonald, C., and White, R.W.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4050 Electronic information resources
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science