Usefulness of Click-Through Data in Expert Search

The task in expert finding is to identify members of an organisation with relevant expertise on a given topic. Typically, an expert search engine uses evidence from the authors of on-topic documents found in the organisation’s intranet by search engines. The search result click-through behavior of many intranet search engine users provides an additional source of evidence to identify topically-relevant documents, and via document authorship, experts. In this poster, we assess the usefulness of click-through log data for expert finding. We find that ranking authors based solely on the clicks their documents receive is reasonably effective at correctly identifying relevant experts. Moreover, we show that this evidence can successfully be integrated with an existing expert search engine to increase its retrieval effectiveness.