Applications

Abstract

The query-independent ranking method presented in the previous chapter can be used in a variety of applications. First of all, it can be applied in a discovery engine for user-generated content. Secondly, in combination with a query-dependent ranking it can be applied in a search engine specialized for user-generated content. Thirdly, the proposed ranking approach can be applied to rank any set of user-generated content units. For example it could be used to rank a set of user-generated content units that are part of a social media monitoring tool. Furthermore, the presented approach can be applied to all types of documents, for which metadata is available that allows to determine an author score, a source score, an intrinsic score, an extrinsic score and a recency score. If information that is required for one of the scores is missing, the ranking can be based on the remaining subset of scores. If, for example, there is no information about the source of a set of documents, the ranking can be based on author-related information, intrinsic information, extrinsic information, and recency.