Expert Finding Revisited: A Uniform Exploration of Methods

Abstract

The goal of expert search is to identify individuals with knowledge or skills in a specific field or for a specific problem. In the context of academia, expert search is enabled by resources such as publications, profiles, and authorship networks; with numerous methods proposed. However, they have been tested on diverse and inconsistent collections, making comparison difficult. Moreover, some of these collections reflect a narrow interpretation of the problem. Our focus in this paper is a fresh examination of expert search, which we pursue by re-evaluation of four previous methods under consistent experimental conditions. We explore those models by factorially varying their similarity functi..