A CDD-based formal model for expert finding

Searching an organization's document repositories for experts is a frequently faced problem in intranet information management. This paper proposes a candidate-centered model which is referred as Candidate Description Document (CDD)-based retrieval model. The expertise evidence about an expert candidate scattered over repositories is mined and aggregated automatically to form a profile called the candidate's CDD, which represents his knowledge. We present the model from its foundations through its logical development and argue in favor of this model for expert finding. We devise and compare the different strategies for exploring a variety of expertise evidence. The experiments on TREC enterprise corpora demonstrate that the CDD-based model achieves significant and consistent improvement on performance through comparative studies with non-CDD methods.