From PageRank to Social Rank: Authority-Based Retrieval in Social Information Spaces

Abstract

Social information spaces are characterized by the presence of a social network between participants. This chapter presents methods for utilizing social networks for information retrieval, by applying graph authority measures to the social network. We show how to integrate authority measures in an information retrieval algorithm. In order to determine the suitability of the described algorithms, we examine the structure and statistical properties of social networks, and present examples of social networks as well as evaluation results.