Contact Finder: Extracting Indications of Expertise and Answering Questions with Referrals

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This paper presents a novel approach to utilizing large heterogeneous information repositories such as the World Wide Web, Lotus NotesTM, or Usenet. Rather than extracting knowledge to be used directly in problem solving, our approach is to extract key contacts for specific technical areas that can then be contacted for help in those areas. We discuss this in the context of ContactFinder, an intelligent agent that extracts key contacts and answers discussion questions with referrals.