Semantic-Based Query Expansion for Academic Expert Finding

Expert finding in academic domain is useful for many purposes, such as: to find research collaborators, article reviewers, thesis advisors, thesis examiners, etc. This work examines the use of semantic information, i.e. word embedding and document embedding, for query expansion to enhance the effectiveness of expert finding system. This information is utilized to bridge the lexical gap between the query and the expertise evidence of the experts. This semantic-based query expansion approach is then combined with a BM25 retrieval method to find relevant experts to the given query. The results show that our methods consistently outperform the strong retrieval method BM25, the semantic-based retrieval, and query expansion using pseudo relevance feedback method according to all recall- and precision-based measures used in this work. This indicates the effectiveness of our methods in improving the number and the accuracy of relevant experts retrieved.