Comparing Retrieval Methods for Academic Advisor Discovery: A Six-Method Study of 768 CS Faculty Profiles Across 9 US Universities
We present a comparative evaluation of six information retrieval methods for the task of academic advisor discovery: ranking CS faculty members by relevance to a graduate applicant's research interest statement. The methods span sparse lexical matching (Jaccard overlap, TF-IDF, BM25), dense semantic retrieval (all-MiniLM-L6-v2 sentence embeddings), hybrid score fusion, and learning-to-rank. Evaluation uses a new domain-specific collection: 768 faculty profiles scraped from 9 US CS departments, with 162 graded relevance judgments (grade 0/1/2) across 5 queries representing distinct graduate student research profiles. Across all five queries, Reranked achieves the highest mean NDCG@10 (0.47...
| Authors | Biraj Subedi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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