Mariam Abdullah¹, Hassan Noureddine¹, Jawad Makki¹, Hussein Charara¹, Hussein Hazimeh², Omar Abou Khaled² and Elena Mugellini², ¹Lebanese University, Lebanon and ²HES-SO/FR, Switzerland

With the enormous growth of data, retrieving information from the Web became more desirable and even more challenging because of the Big Data issues (e.g. noise, corruption, bad quality…etc.). Expert seeking, defined as returning a ranked list of expert researchers given a topic, has been a real concern in the last 15 years. This kind of task comes in handy when building scientific committees, requiring to identify the scholars’ experience to assign them the most suitable roles in addition to other factors as well. Due to the fact the Web is drowning with plenty of data, this opens up the opportunity to collect different kinds of expertise evidence. In this paper, we propose an expert seeking approach with specifying the most desirable features (i.e. criteria on which researcher’s evaluation is done) along with their estimation techniques. We utilized some machine learning techniques in our system and we aim at verifying the effectiveness of incorporating influential features that go beyond publications.

Entity retrieval, Expert seeking, Academia, Information extraction