Patent 8156097 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on April, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A two stage model identifies individuals having knowledge in a subject matter area relevant to a query. A relevance model receives a query and identifies documents, or other information, relevant to the query. A co-occurrence model identifies individuals, in the retrieved documents, related to the subject matter of the query. Individuals identified can be scored by combining scores from the relevance model and the co-occurrence model and output in a rank ordered list.