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.
Following this direction, @cite_15 proposed a hybrid approach based on query expansion and relevance feedback techniques on top of the BM25 ranking function to build an entity retrieval framework. In contrast to this work, we use the state-of-the-art BM25F @cite_19 @cite_21 to assign varying degrees of importance to different parts of a document. Further, through an offline pre-processing step we are able to infer links between similar entities for the retrieval process. This is particularly important when considering datasets that have less links between entities, a significant feature of the work by @cite_15 . Another advantage of adopting BM25F is penalising documents entities, consisting of long textual literals, in the final ranking @cite_0 . Sindice @cite_11 is another approach focusing on indexing RDF documents. It supports data discovery and integration by taking advantage of DBpedia entities as a source to actively index resources. The process performed by Sindice plays a key role in centralising disparate data sources on the Web. The adoption of entities and foremost entity types (topics) is also supported by @cite_7 in the recommendation of entities in Web search. Our approach can benefit Sindice by indexing documents following a topic-based fashion.
@cite_7 @cite_21 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_15 @cite_11
1784290353 2165613971 2168044903 2000411838 2141957180 2084401375
Over the last decades, several billion Web pages have been made available on the Web. The ongoing transition from the current Web of unstructured data to the Web of Data yet requires scalable and accurate approaches for the extraction of structured data in RDF (Resource Description Framework) from these websites. One of the key steps towards extracting RDF from text is the disambiguation of named entities. While several approaches aim to tackle this problem, they still achieve poor accuracy. We address this drawback by presenting AGDISTIS, a novel knowledge-base-agnostic approach for named entity disambiguation. Our approach combines the Hypertext-Induced Topic Search (HITS) algorithm with label expansion strategies and string similarity measures. Based on this combination, AGDISTIS can efficiently detect the correct URIs for a given set of named entities within an input text. We evaluate our approach on eight different datasets against state-of-the-art named entity disambiguation frameworks. Our results indicate that we outperform the state-of-the-art approach by up to 29 F-measure. Despite the widespread use of BM25, there have been few studies examining its effectiveness on a document description over single and multiple field combinations. We determine the effectiveness of BM25 on various document fields. We find that BM25 models relevance on popularity fields such as anchor text and query click information no better than a linear function of the field attributes. We also find query click information to be the single most important field for retrieval. In response, we develop a machine learning approach to BM25-style retrieval that learns, using LambdaRank, from the input attributes of BM25. Our model significantly improves retrieval effectiveness over BM25 and BM25F. Our data-driven approach is fast, effective, avoids the problem of parameter tuning, and can directly optimize for several common information retrieval measures. We demonstrate the advantages of our model on a very large real-world Web data collection. 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. 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. Given a set @math of @math strings of total length @math , our task is to report the "most relevant"strings for a given query pattern @math . This involves somewhat more advanced query functionality than the usual pattern matching, as some notion of "most relevant" is involved. In information retrieval literature, this task is best achieved by using inverted indexes. However, inverted indexes work only for some predefined set of patterns. In the pattern matching community, the most popular pattern-matching data structures are suffix trees and suffix arrays. However, a typical suffix tree search involves going through all the occurrences of the pattern over the entire string collection, which might be a lot more than the required relevant documents. The first formal framework to study such kind of retrieval problems was given by [Muthukrishnan, 2002]. He considered two metrics for relevance: frequency and proximity. He took a threshold-based approach on these metrics and gave data structures taking @math words of space. We study this problem in a slightly different framework of reporting the top @math most relevant documents (in sorted order) under similar and more general relevance metrics. Our framework gives linear space data structure with optimal query times for arbitrary score functions. As a corollary, it improves the space utilization for the problems in [Muthukrishnan, 2002] while maintaining optimal query performance. We also develop compressed variants of these data structures for several specific relevance metrics. The integration of the classical Web (of documents) with the emerging Web of Data is a challenging vision. In this paper we focus on an integration approach during searching which aims at enriching the responses of non-semantic search systems (e.g. professional search systems, web search engines) with semantic information, i.e. Linked Open Data (LOD), and exploiting the outcome for providing an overview of the search space and allowing the users (apart from restricting it) to explore the related LOD. We use named entities (e.g. persons, locations, etc.) as the "glue" for automatically connecting search hits with LOD. We consider a scenario where this entity-based integration is performed at query time with no human effort, and no a-priori indexing, which is beneficial in terms of configurability and freshness. To realize this scenario one has to tackle various challenges. One spiny issue is that the number of identified entities can be high, the same is true for the semantic information about these entities that can be fetched from the available LOD (i.e. their properties and associations with other entities). To this end, in this paper we propose a Link Analysis-based method which is used for (a) ranking (and thus selecting to show) the more important semantic information related to the search results, (b) deriving and showing top-K semantic graphs. In the sequel, we report the results of a survey regarding the marine domain with promising results, and comparative results that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed (Page Rank-based) ranking scheme. Finally, we report experimental results regarding efficiency showing that the proposed functionality can be offered even at query time.