As cyber-communities boom on the Internet, searching useful and reliable information in communities such as forums, newsgroups, and blogs is becoming a more and more important task. Unfortunately, most existing information retrieval systems which perform well on document collections and inter-connected web pages do not fit such task well. For example, Popular Internet search methods such as HITS and PageRank rely on the link structure of web pages which is often absent in the postings of cyber-communities. Traditional statistical information retrieval methods which treat the data as documents composed of terms cannot utilize some very important information like who wrote the document and how expert he was on the topic. In this paper, we proposed a novel framework which profiles individual's expertise and utilizes them to rank the postings.
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