Incorporating Similar People for Expert Finding in Enterprise Corpora

The task of finding authoritative people within an organization has received increased interest over the past few years. To identify an expert in a specific field, expertise evidence of candidates should be collected in the enterprise corpora to represent one\´s knowledge and skills. Though there have been various methods proposed for evidence collecting and expertise modeling, little work has been done to collect evidence by exploring the relationship between candidates. In this paper, we build a "bridge" between candidates to find out people who have similar intellectual structure within the organization and then supplement an individual by incorporating the evidence collected for his similar people. Besides, a document prior based on the PageRank weight is adopted to illustrate the significance of a page so as to improve the performance of the expert finding system. Finally, we evaluate our methods on enterprise corpora provided by TREC. Experimental results show that the incorporation of similar people and the document prior bring gains to the final results and our proposed methods have excellent performance.