Extracting expertise to facilitate exploratory search and information discovery: Combining information retrieval techniques with a computational cognitive model

We compared and combined the traditional information retrieval (IR) methods of expert identification with a computational cognitive model to test their effectiveness in facilitating exploratory search performance using a data set from a large-scale social tagging system. We found that the two methods of expert identification, although based on different assumptions, were in general consistent in extracting useful structures for exploratory search. The methods, however, did show systematic differences in their effectiveness to guide users to find popular vs less popular topics. The findings have important implications on presentations of information cues that facilitate interactive IR and discovery.