Expert Finding in Legal Community Question Answering

Abstract: Expert finding has been well-studied in community question answering (QA) systems in various domains. However, none of these studies addresses expert finding in the legal domain, where the goal is for citizens to find lawyers based on their expertise. In the legal domain, there is a large knowledge gap between the experts and the searchers, and the content on the legal QA websites consist of a combination formal and informal communication. In this paper, we propose methods for generating query-dependent textual profiles for lawyers covering several aspects including sentiment, comments, and recency. We combine query-dependent profiles with existing expert finding methods. Our experiments are conducted on a novel dataset gathered from an online legal QA service. We discovered that taking into account different lawyer profile aspects improves the best baseline model. We make our dataset publicly available for future work.