Determining Expert Profiles (With an Application to Expert Finding)

The profile of an individual is a record of the types and areas of skills of that individual ("topical profile") plus a description of her collaboration network ("social profile"). In this paper we define and formalize the task of automatically determining an expert profile of a person from a heterogeneous corpus made up of a large organization's intranet. We propose multiple models for addressing the topical profiling task. Our main methods build on ideas from information retrieval, while refinements bring in filtering (allowing an area into a person's profile only if she is among the top ranking experts in the area). An evaluation based on the W3C-corpus made available by TREC, shows significant improvements of the refined methods over the baseline. We apply our profiling algorithms to significantly enhance the performance of a state-ofthe-art expert finding algorithm and to help users of an operational expert search system find the person they would contact, given a specific problem, topic or information need. Finally, we address the task of determining a social profile for a given person, using graph-based methods.