Modern expert finding algorithms are developed under the assumption that all possible expertise evidence for a person is concentrated in a company that currently employs the person. The evidence that can be acquired outside of an enterprise is traditionally unnoticed. At the same time, the Web is full of personal information which is sufficiently detailed to judge about a person’s skills and knowledge. In this work, we review various sources of expertise evidence outside of an organization and experiment with rankings built on the data acquired from six different sources, accessible through APIs of two major web search engines. We show that these rankings and their combinations are often more realistic and of higher quality than rankings built on organizational data only.

An expert finding system allows a user to type a simple text query and retrieve names and contact information of individuals that possess the expertise expressed in the query. This paper proposes a novel approach to expert finding in large enterprises or intranets by modeling candidate experts (persons), web documents and various relations among them with so-called expertise graphs. As distinct from the stateof-the-art approaches estimating personal expertise through one-step propagation of relevance probability from documents to the related candidates, our methods are based on the principle of multi-step relevance propagation in topicspecific expertise graphs. We model the process of expert finding by probabilistic random walks of three kinds: finite, infinite and absorbing. Experiments on TREC Enterprise Track data originating from two large organizations show that our methods using multi-step relevance propagation improve over the baseline one-step propagation based method in almost all cases.