A Model for Expert Finding in Social Networks

Expert finding is a task of finding knowledgeable people on a given topic. State-of-the-art expertise retrieval algorithms identify matching experts based on analysis of textual content of documents experts are associated with. While powerful, these models ignore social structure that might be available. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian hierarchical model for expert finding that accounts for both social relationships and content. The model assumes that social links are determined by expertise similarity between candidates. We demonstrate the improved retrieval performance of our model over the baseline on a realistic data set.