On principles of egocentric person search in social networks

Person search is the problem of finding, by means of keyword search, relevant people in a social network. In egocentric person search, the search query is issued by a person s participating in the social network, and the goal is to find people that possess two qualities: relevancy to the query, and relevancy to s herself. This position paper considers the latter quality, and specifically, scoring functions that rank persons by their relevancy to s. In particular, the paper proposes general principles (i.e., properties) that should be held by such scoring functions. Several functions, which were proposed in the past for measuring node connectivity, are analyzed with respect to the proposed principles. It is shown that none of these functions sufficiently satisfy the principles. In contrast, the paper presents two additional functions that satisfy the principles in a strong sense.