Who is the expert? combining intention and knowledge of online discussants in collaborative RE tasks

Large, distributed software development projects rely on the collaboration of culturally heterogeneous and geographically distributed stakeholders. Software requirements, as well as solution ideas are elicited in distributed processes, which increasingly use online forums and mailing lists, in which stakeholders mainly use free or semi-structured natural language text. The identification of contributors of key information about a given topic –called experts, in both the software domain and code– and in particular an automated support for retrieving information from available online resources, are becoming of crucial importance. In this paper, we address the problem of expert finding in mailing-list discussions, and propose an approach which combines content- and intent-based information extraction for ranking online discussants with respect to their expertise in the discussed topics. We illustrate its application on an example.