In Enterprise settings, expert search is considered an important task. In this search task, the user has a need for expertise
- for instance, they require assistance from someone about a topic of interest. An expert search system assists users with
their “expertise need” by suggesting people with relevant expertise to the topic of interest. In this work, we apply an expert
search approach that does not explicitly rank candidates in response to a query, but instead implicitly ranks candidates by
taking into account a ranking of document with respect to the query topic. Pseudo-relevance feedback, aka query expansion,
has been shown to improve retrieval performance in adhoc search tasks. In this work, we investigate to which extent query
expansion can be applied in an expert search task to improve the accuracy of the generated ranking of candidates. We define
two approaches for query expansion, one based on the initial of ranking of documents for the query topic. The second approach
is based on the final ranking of candidates. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to determine if query expansion
can be successfully applied in the expert search task, and secondly, to ascertain if either of the two forms of query expansion
can provide robust, improved retrieval performance. We perform a thorough evaluation contrasting the two query expansion approaches
in the context of the TREC 2005 and 2006 Enterprise tracks.