The traditional entity extraction problem lies in the ability of extracting named entities from plain text using natural language processing techniques and intensive training from large document collections. Examples of named entities include organisations, people, locations, or dates. There are many research activities involving named entities; we are interested in entity ranking in the field of information retrieval. In this paper, we describe our approach to identifying and ranking entities from the INEX Wikipedia document collection. Wikipedia offers a number of interesting features for entity identification and ranking that we first introduce. We then describe the principles and the architecture of our entity ranking system, and introduce our methodology for evaluation. Our preliminary results show that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia, together with entity examples, can significantly improve retrieval effectiveness.
The importance of reuse is well recognised for electronic document writing. However, it is rarely achieved satisfactorily because of the complexity of the task: integrating different formats, handling updates of information, addressing document author’s need for intuitiveness and simplicity, etc. In this paper, we present a language for information reuse that allows users to write virtual documents, where dynamic information objects can be retrieved from various sources, transformed, and included along with static information in SGML documents. The language uses a tree-like structure for the representation of information objects, and allows querying without a complete knowledge of the structure or the types of information. The data structures and the syntax of the language are presented through an example application. A major strength of our approach is to treat the document as a non-monolithic set of reusable information objects.  This paper describes a tool, called Nodose, we have developed to expedite the creation of robust wrappers. Nodose allows non-programmers to build components that can convert data from the source format to XML or another generic format. Further, the generated code performs a set of statistical checks at runtime that attempt to find extraction errors before they are propogated back to users. The Web has become a major conduit to information repositories of all kinds. Today, more than 80 of information published on the Web is generated by underlying databases (however access is granted through a Web gateway using forms as a query language and HTML as a display vehicle) and this proportion keeps increasing. But Web data sources also consist of standalone HTML pages hand-coded by individuals, that provide very useful information such as reviews, digests, links, etc. As for the information that also exists in underlying databases, the HTML interface is often the only one available for many would-be clients.