Patent ID: 8433660

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of selecting an expert, the method comprising the steps of: receiving at least one task feature describing a characteristic of a task to be assigned to an expert; receiving, for each of a plurality of experts, at least one expert feature describing a characteristic of that expert; arranging a machine learning system to access a mapping from expert features and task features to a multi-dimensional latent trait space, that mapping having been learnt by the machine learning system; and arranging a selection engine to, for each expert, map the task features and expert features to the multi-dimensional trait space using the mapping to produce a latent task trait and a latent expert trait and to combine the latent task trait and latent expert trait using a similarity measure to obtain an estimate of a probability distribution over the expert's performance on the task; and arranging the selection engine to select one of the experts on the basis of the estimated probability distributions.