  The objective of an expert recommendation system is to trace a set of
candidates' expertise and preferences, recognize their expertise patterns, and
identify experts. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal classification
approach for expert recommendation system (BERTERS). In our proposed system,
the modalities are derived from text (articles published by candidates) and
graph (their co-author connections) information. BERTERS converts text into a
vector using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT).
Also, a graph Representation technique called ExEm is used to extract the
features of candidates from the co-author network. Final representation of a
candidate is the concatenation of these vectors and other features. Eventually,
a classifier is built on the concatenation of features. This multimodal
approach can be used in both the academic community and the community question
answering. To verify the effectiveness of BERTERS, we analyze its performance
on multi-label classification and visualization tasks.
