CSIR at TREC 2008 Expert Search Task: Modeling Expert Evidence in Expertise Retrieval

In this paper, we described our method for the expert search task in TREC 2008. First, we proposed an adaption to the language modeling method for expert search, which considers the probability of query generation separately using each kind of expert evidence (full name, abbreviated name, and email address). Current expert search models can be easily integrated into our method. Our experiments indicated that our method can make use of the ambiguous evidence in expert search (abbreviated name), which often casued a drop in effects in other methods. Besides, we also used a probabilistic measure to detect phrase in query, but it did not make better effectiveness.