Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval
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Expert search has been studied in different contexts, e.g., enterprises, academic communities. We examine a general expert search problem: searching experts on the web, where millions of webpages and thousands of names are considered. It has mainly two challenging issues: 1) webpages could be of varying quality and full of noises; 2) The expertise evidences scattered in webpages are usually vague and ambiguous. We propose to leverage the large amount of co-occurrence information to assess relevance and reputation of a person name for a query topic. The co-occurrence structure is modeled using a hypergraph, on which a heat diffusion based ranking algorithm is proposed. Query keywords are regarded as heat sources, and a person name which has strong connection with the query (i.e., frequently co-occur with query keywords and co-occur with other names related to query keywords) will receive most of the heat, thus being ranked high. Experiments on the ClueWeb09 web collection show that our algorithm is effective for retrieving experts and outperforms baseline algorithms significantly. This work would be regarded as one step toward addressing the more general entity search problem without sophisticated NLP techniques.