ELI⇥IR: Expertise Learning & Identification ⇥ Information Retrieval

In today’s knowledge-based economy, having the proper expertise is crucial to resolving many tasks. Expertise Finding (EF) is the area of research concerned with matching available experts to given tasks. As tandard approach is to input at ask description/proposal/paper into an EF system, and receive recommended experts as output. Mostly, EF systems operate either via a content-based approach, which uses the text of the input, as well as the text of the available experts’ profiles to determine a match, and structure-based approaches, which use the inherent relationship between experts, affiliations, papers, etc. (such as is available in citation networks). The majority of methods use one approach (content-based, "C") or the other (structure-based, "S"); though sometimes both approaches are used in tandem (C and S). The underlying data representation is fundamentally different, which makes the methods mutually incompatible. However, in previous work Watanabe et al. [34] achieved good results by converting content-based data to a structure-representation and using a structure-based approach. We posit that the reverse may also hold merit, namely, a content-based approach leveraging structure-based data converted to a content-based representation. We compare our idea to a content only-based approach, demonstrating that our method yields substantially better performance, and thereby substantiating our claim.