Exploiting Sequential Dependencies for Expert Finding

We propose an expert finding method based on assumption of sequential dependence between a candidate expert and the query terms in the scope of a document. We assume that the strength of relation of a candidate to the document's content depends on its position in this document with respect to the positions of the query terms. The experiments on the official Enterprise TREC data demonstrate the advantage of our method over the method based on independence of query terms and persons in a document.