Expert locator using concept linking

Abstract

A common task in many applications is to find persons who are knowledgeable about a given topic. The ‘expert locator’ is a tool for finding people with relevant expertise and/or experience for a given subject. The potential value of the expert locator is directly related to the size of the searchable population. This paper addresses the issue of expert finding in educational and research domain and describes a novel method for expert finding using concept linking. Finding an expert in this domain is an important issue and it is necessary for problem consulting/solving, question answering, providing more detailed information on a topic and team building. The locator is designed to provide instant searches for people based on their qualifications, teaching experience in the field, research, activities like publications, associations, colleagues, patents, awards and panels/boards. Experimental results show that this approach can outperform the baseline approach.