Experion: A framework for contextualizing evidence in expert finding

Expert finding is traditionally related to a subject of research in information retrieval and, often, is taken to mean "expertise retrieval within a specific organization". The task involves finding an expert in an expertise topic. Even though there are interesting proposals in the literature, they do not consider the context in which a given expertise is bound. This Ph.D. thesis introduces the concept of a framework that chronologically contextualizes search results in expert finding. Our motivation is to provide more accurate results of search processes related to finding experts in a given topic, contextualizing the expertise on professional/academic activities, an open research topic. In this paper, we present the main concepts of the framework we are developing and a general overview of its operation. At the moment, we are using the Lattes platform as a data source, for which we developed a process to extract expertise evidence, supported by the Crossref database.

A network approach to expertise retrieval based on path similarity and credit allocation

With the increasing availability of online scholarly databases, publication records can be easily extracted and analysed. Researchers can promptly keep abreast of others’ scientific production and, in principle, can select new collaborators and build new research teams. A critical factor one should consider when contemplating new potential collaborations is the possibility of unambiguously defining the expertise of other researchers. While some organisations have established database systems to enable their members to manually produce a profile, maintaining such systems is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in retrieving expertise through automated approaches. Indeed, the identification of researchers’ expertise is of great value in many applications, such as identifying qualified experts to supervise new researchers, assigning manuscripts to reviewers, and forming a qualified team. Here, we propose a network-based approach to the construction of authors’ expertise profiles. Using the MEDLINE corpus as an example, we show that our method can be applied to a number of widely used data sets and outperforms other methods traditionally used for expertise identification.

Expert Finding Systems: A Systematic Review

The data overload problem and the specific nature of the experts’ knowledge can hinder many users from finding experts with the expertise they required. There are several expert finding systems, which aim to solve the data overload problem and often recommend experts who can fulfil the users’ information needs. This study conducted a Systematic Literature Review on the state-of-the-art expert finding systems and expertise seeking studies published between 2010 and 2019. We used a systematic process to select ninety-six articles, consisting of 57 journals, 34 conference proceedings, three book chapters, and one thesis. This study analyses the domains of expert finding systems, expertise sources, methods, and datasets. It also discusses the differences between expertise retrieval and seeking. Moreover, it identifies the contextual factors that have been combined into expert finding systems. Finally, it identifies five gaps in expert finding systems for future research. This review indicated that ≈65% of expert finding systems are used in the academic domain. This review forms a basis for future expert finding systems research.

CredSaT: Credibility ranking of users in big social data incorporating semantic analysis and temporal factor

The widespread use of big social data has influenced the research community in several significant ways. In particular, the notion of social trust has attracted a great deal of attention from information processors and computer scientists as well as information consumers and formal organisations. This attention is embodied in the various shapes social trust has taken, such as its use in recommendation systems, viral marketing and expertise retrieval. Hence, it is essential to implement frameworks that are able to temporally measure a user’s credibility in all categories of big social data. To this end, this article suggests the CredSaT (Credibility incorporating Semantic analysis and Temporal factor), which is a fine-grained credibility analysis framework for use in big social data. A novel metric that includes both new and current features, as well as the temporal factor, is harnessed to establish the credibility ranking of users. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy and applicability of our model in determining highly domain-based trustworthy users. Furthermore, CredSaT may also be used to identify spammers and other anomalous users.