The increasing amount of data on the Web, in particular of Linked Data, has led to a diverse landscape of datasets, which make entity retrieval a challenging task. Explicit cross-dataset links, for instance to indicate co-references or related entities can significantly improve entity retrieval. However, only a small fraction of entities are interlinked through explicit statements. In this paper, we propose a two-fold entity retrieval approach. In a first, offline preprocessing step, we cluster entities based on the x---means and spectral clustering algorithms. In the second step, we propose an optimized retrieval model which takes advantage of our precomputed clusters. For a given set of entities retrieved by the BM25F retrieval approach and a given user query, we further expand the result set with relevant entities by considering features of the queries, entities and the precomputed clusters. Finally, we re-rank the expanded result set with respect to the relevance to the query. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation on the Billions Triple Challenge BTC12 dataset. The proposed approach shows significant improvements compared to the baseline and state of the art approaches.
A large portion of queries issued in Web search engines target entities or contain semantic resources (such as types, relations and attributes) @cite_8 as a primary intent. Consequently, the identification of entity-centric queries has become of particular concern for commercial search engines serving as a means to narrow the search space and to provide contextual query results @cite_13 . Thus, the traditional task of Ad-hoc Document Retrieval (ADR) @cite_6 is moving towards an entity retrieval task @cite_8 . Hence, instead of top-- @math document retrieval that match a keyword query, the task and therefore the results are increasingly becoming entity-centric.
@cite_13 @cite_6 @cite_8
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Analysis on Web search query logs has revealed that there is a large portion of entity-bearing queries, reflecting the increasing demand of users on retrieving relevant information about entities such as persons, organizations, products, etc. In the meantime, significant progress has been made in Web-scale information extraction, which enables efficient entity extraction from free text. Since an entity is expected to capture the semantic content of documents and queries more accurately than a term, it would be interesting to study whether leveraging the information about entities can improve the retrieval accuracy for entity-bearing queries. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval approach, i.e., latent entity space (LES), which models the relevance by leveraging entity profiles to represent semantic content of documents and queries. In the LES, each entity corresponds to one dimension, representing one semantic relevance aspect. We propose a formal probabilistic framework to model the relevance in the high-dimensional entity space. Experimental results over TREC collections show that the proposed LES approach is effective in capturing latent semantic content and can significantly improve the search accuracy of several state-of-the-art retrieval models for entity-bearing queries. In recent years, the amount of entities in large knowledge bases available on the Web has been increasing rapidly, making it possible to propose new ways of intelligent information access. Within the context of globalization, there is a clear need for techniques and systems that can enable multilingual and cross-lingual information access. In this paper, we present XKnowSearch!, a novel entity-based system for multilingual and cross-lingual information retrieval, which supports keyword search and also allows users to influence the search process according to their search intents. By leveraging the multilingual knowledge base on the Web, keyword queries and documents can be represented in their semantic forms, which can facilitate query disambiguation and expansion, and can also overcome the language barrier between queries and documents in different languages. Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data. We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text expansion approaches. Retrieving semi-structured entities to answer keyword queries is an increasingly important feature of many modern Web applications. The fast-growing Linked Open Data (LOD) movement makes it possible to crawl and index very large amounts of structured data describing hundreds of millions of entities. However, entity retrieval approaches have yet to find efficient and effective ways of ranking and navigating through those large data sets. In this paper, we address the problem of Ad-hoc Object Retrieval over large-scale LOD data by proposing a hybrid approach that combines IR and structured search techniques. Specifically, we propose an architecture that exploits an inverted index to answer keyword queries as well as a semi-structured database to improve the search effectiveness by automatically generating queries over the LOD graph. Experimental results show that our ranking algorithms exploiting both IR and graph indices outperform state-of-the-art entity retrieval techniques by up to 25 over the BM25 baseline.