University of Twente at the TREC 2007 Enterprise Track: Modeling Relevance Propagation for the Expert Search Task

This paper describes several approaches which we used for the expert search task of the TREC 2007 Enterprise track. We studied several methods of relevance propagation from documents to related candidate experts. Instead of onestep propagation from documents to directly related candidates, used by many systems in the previous years, we do not limit the relevance flow and disseminate it further through mutual documents-candidates connections. We model relevance propagation using random walk principles, or in formal terms, discrete Markov processes. We experiment with infinite and finite number of propagation steps. We also demonstrate how additional information, namely hyperlinks among documents, organizational structure of the enterprise and relevance feedback may be utilized by the presented techniques.