I took a little break from work so I could celebrate Christmas, spend time with the family, etc. I am back online now, and ready to commit myself to full-time thesis writing for the upcoming several weeks.
As to expert search material, here is a quick update.
- Our (me and Maarten de Rijke) recent paper titled Associating People and Documents has been accepted to ECIR 2008. Common to most expertise search approaches is a component that estimates the strength of the association between a document and a people. In this paper we perform a careful analysis and investigation of how different association methods contribute to performance. The camera-ready version of the paper will be available from the Publications page, after jan 11).
- We (me, Maarten, and Leif Azzopardi) submitted a paper titled A Language Modeling Framework for Expertise Search to the Information Processing and Management (IPM) journal. In this paper we introduce our language modeling approaches to expertise search in detail, and integrate these into a generative probabilistic framework. Since it is not a conference paper, it may take some time until it can be published.
There is some reading material from CIKM 2007:
- (Macdonald and Ounis)
Expertise drift and query expansion in expert search - (Petkova and Croft)
Proximity-based document representation for named entity retrieval - (Fu et al.)
A CDD-based formal model for expert finding (poster)
Looks like the topic of expertise retrieval is gaining more and more popularity in IR conferences. While browsing the list of accepted papers for ECIR 2008, I found 3 full papers (out of 33) and 1 short paper (out of 19) about expert search, which gives the topic a solid presence.
- (Serdyukov and Hiemstra)
Modeling documents as mixtures of persons for expert finding [full] - (Balog and de Rijke)
Associating People and Documents [full] - (Macdonald et al.)
High Quality Expertise Evidence for Expert Search [full] - (Macdonald and Ounis)
Expert Search Evaluation by Supporting Documents [short]