Patent ID: 8856109

Claim:
A computer-implemented method at an information retrieval system comprising: receiving query terms relating to at least one topic; using the query terms to retrieve a ranked list of documents from an index of documents, where the ranked list of documents has at least one document identifier, an author of the identified document and a topical affinity measure of the author and the at least one topic, where a topical affinity measure indicates the strength of association between an author and a topic; constructing a topical-affinity badge for the author of the identified document by using the topical affinity measure, the topical affinity badge being a graphical element; making the ranked list and the topical-affinity badge accessible to a user interface; generating author features from documents available to the information retrieval system, the author features comprising any one or more of: recency features related to the recency of an author's documents, frequency features relating to frequency of an author's document, and presentation features relating to how an author presents him or herself with respect to one or more topics; and at least one of: generating author features which are recency features by: separating an author's documents into bins according to a time associated with each document, weighting the number of documents in the bins according to a chronological order of the bins, and aggregating the weighted number of documents in each bin; generating author features which are frequency features by: separating an author's documents into bins according to a time associated with each document, calculating an average number of days between subsequent documents in each bin, applying a weights according to a chronological order of the bins, and aggregating the weighted average number of days between subsequent documents in each bin; generating author features which are presentation features by identifying keywords in documents of an author and counting a number of the identified keywords related to a specified topic, where the identified keywords are discriminating keywords which distinguish between topics; or generating author features which are presentation features by identifying keywords in presentation documents of an author and counting a number of the identified keywords related to a specified topic, where the identified keywords are discriminating keywords which distinguish between topics, and where presentation documents of an author are documents in which the author gives biographical details.