Finding expertise using online community dialogue and the Duality of Expertise

The Duality of Expertise considers the “Expert” to be a social role dependent on an individual’s expertise claims and the opinion of their community towards those claims. These are the internal and external aspects of a person’s expertise. My Expertise Model incorporates this duality in a process designed for expertise finding software in an online community forum. In this model, a posting’s term usage is evidence of expertise claims. The dialogue acts in replies to those postings are evidence of the community’s opinion. The model’s preprocessing element uses a bricolage of linguistic and IR tools and methods in a novel way to construct each author’s expertise profile. For any topic query, the profiles are ranked to determine the Community Topic Expert. A series of experiments demonstrate the advantage of utilising the Duality of Expertise when ranking experts rather than just the internal or external aspects of expertise.