Teezir’s Expert Finding solutions is based on the widely accepted observation that Experts write about their expertise. This observation has lead to a research area in the academic information retrieval community, eventually leading to Expert Finding solutions. Teezir’s Expert Finding solution is a state of the art implementation of the latest research on this topic.
Commercial Expert Finding solutions are available based on two different approaches. The most mainstream Expert Finding approach is to gather specific thesaurus-based information from existing documents and map this extracted information to the people that wrote these documents. This approach is followed by companies such as Collexis and WCC. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that you can pre-determine the words that describe what expertise exists in a company. However, when people issue a search query, they are never bounded by a thesaurus-based keyword restriction. The result is a situation where external consultants are hired to expand the thesaurus with more and more terms, degrading the expert finding precision at the cost of many hours of consultancy.
For this reason, Teezir chose not to take the extraction of specific thesaurus-based words as a basis. As an alternative, relevance is measured by statistically determining which experts best match specific query words with respect to all documents that an expert wrote and with respect to all documents that are available in the complete collection. The added value of this approach is that no thesaurus is required to find the right expert, thereby making the solution much cheaper and much more flexible to different domains.
But there’s more… Thesauri are based on hard relations between words. These hard relations are often obtained through a combination of manual labor and machine learning. However, by doing this, context dependent information is lost about how important relations really are. In retrospect, by utilizing statistical methods for determining relevance, this information is used as the basis for the matching process. This effectively means that you end up with better expert search results, while having a cheaper solution. Different companies understood this fact and therefore chose Teezir as their supplier for Expert Finding.(See also 'Our Clients' section)