Probabilistic Local Expert Retrieval

Wen Li, Carsten Eickhoff, Arjen P. de Vries

Abstract: This paper proposes a range of probabilistic models of local expertise based on geo-tagged social network streams. We assume that frequent visits result in greater familiarity with the location in question. To capture this notion, we rely on spatio-temporal information from users’ online check-in profiles. We evaluate the proposed models on a large-scale sample of geo-tagged and manually annotated Twitter streams. Our experiments show that the proposed methods outperform both intuitive baselines as well as established models such as the iterative inference scheme.