1. 1
Personalizing Forum Search using
Multidimensional Random Walks
Gayatree Ganu Amélie Marian
Project: Patient Emotion and stRucture Search USer tool (PERSEUS)
NSF Grants IIS-084493, BCS-1027801, Google Research Award
GOAL:
Improve forum search by leveraging user similarities
• Co-participation
• Past interactions
• Topical similarities
• Profile similarities

2. 2
Our Approach
• Compute user similarities using multidimensional
random walks (MRW)
• Algorithm Outline:
– Build multidimensional heterogeneous graph
– Execute rooted MRW with egocentric relation weights
– Scores represent similarity incorporating multiple relations
Relation A
Relation B
Relation C
r1
r22
b
1
4
c
4
21
4
Amélie Marian – Rutgers University – ICWSM’14

3. 3
Key Results
• Personalized forum search, predicting similar users will
answer questions in future threads
– MRW has highest prediction MAP compared to 6 baselines
– MRW improves over best baseline by 10% for top-10 similar users,
21% for top-100
• Enhanced keyword search
– Re-ranked tf*idf results using the authority of contributors
computed over multiple user relations
– 5% relevance improvement in MAP@10, judged by human raters
Amélie Marian – Rutgers University – ICWSM’14