A user-oriented model for expert finding

Expert finding addresses the problem of retrieving a ranked list of people who are knowledgeable on a given topic. Several models have been proposed to solve this task, but so far these have focused solely on returning the most knowledgeable people as experts on a particular topic. In this paper we argue that in a real-world organizational setting the notion of the “best expert” also depends on the individual user and her needs. We propose a user-oriented approach that balances two factors that influence the user’s choice: time to contact an expert, and the knowledge value gained after. We use the distance between the user and an expert in a social network to estimate contact time, and consider various social graphs, based on organizational hierarchy, geographical location, and collaboration, as well as the combination of these. Using a realistic test set, created from interactions of employees with a university-wide expert search engine, we demonstrate substantial improvements over a state-of-the-art baseline on all retrieval measures.