Bloggers as experts

We address the task of (blog) feed distillation: to find blogs that are principally devoted to a given topic. The task may be viewed as an association finding task, between topics and bloggers. Under this view, it resembles the expert finding task, for which a range of models have been proposed. We adopt two language modeling-based approaches to expert finding, and determine their effectiveness as feed distillation strategies. The two models capture the idea that a human will often search for key blogs by spotting highly relevant posts (the Posting model) or by taking global aspects of the blog into account (the Blogger model). Results show the Blogger model outperforms the Posting model and delivers state-of-the art performance, out-of-the-box.