A common approach for knowledge-base entity search is to consider an entity as a document with multiple fields. Models that focus on matching query terms in different fields are popular choices for searching such entity representations. An instance of such a model is FSDM (Fielded Sequential Dependence Model). We propose to integrate field-level semantic features into FSDM. We use FSDM to retrieve a pool of documents, and then to use semantic field-level features to re-rank those documents. We propose to represent queries as bags of terms as well as bags of entities, and eventually, use their dense vector representation to compute semantic features based on query document similarity. Our proposed re-ranking approach achieves significant improvement in entity retrieval on the DBpedia-Entity (v2) dataset over existing FSDM model. Specifically, for all queries we achieve 2.5 and 1.2 significant improvement in NDCG@10 and NDCG@100, respectively.
 Information Retrieval (IR) approaches for semantic web search engines have become very populars in the last years. Popularization of different IR libraries, like Lucene, that allows IR implementations almost out-of-the-box have make easier IR integration in Semantic Web search engines. However, one of the most important features of Semantic Web documents is the structure, since this structure allow us to represent semantic in a machine readable format. In this paper we analyze the specific problems of structured IR and how to adapt weighting schemas for semantic document retrieval.  Semantic Search refers to a loose set of concepts, challenges and techniques having to do with harnessing the information of the growing Web of Data (WoD) for Web search. Here we propose a formal model of one specific semantic search task: ad-hoc object retrieval. We show that this task provides a solid framework to study some of the semantic search problems currently tackled by commercial Web search engines. We connect this task to the traditional ad-hoc document retrieval and discuss appropriate evaluation metrics. Finally, we carry out a realistic evaluation of this task in the context of a Web search application. This paper describes a simple way of adapting the BM25 ranking formula to deal with structured documents. In the past it has been common to compute scores for the individual fields (e.g. title and body) independently and then combine these scores (typically linearly) to arrive at a final score for the document. We highlight how this approach can lead to poor performance by breaking the carefully constructed non-linear saturation of term frequency in the BM25 function. We propose a much more intuitive alternative which weights term frequencies before the non-linear term frequency saturation function is applied. In this scheme, a structured document with a title weight of two is mapped to an unstructured document with the title content repeated twice. This more verbose unstructured document is then ranked in the usual way. We demonstrate the advantages of this method with experiments on Reuters Vol1 and the TREC dotGov collection. This paper addresses the problem of Named Entity Recognition in Query (NERQ), which involves detection of the named entity in a given query and classification of the named entity into predefined classes. NERQ is potentially useful in many applications in web search. The paper proposes taking a probabilistic approach to the task using query log data and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We consider contexts of a named entity (i.e., the remainders of the named entity in queries) as words of a document, and classes of the named entity as topics. The topic model is constructed by a novel and general learning method referred to as WS-LDA (Weakly Supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation), which employs weakly supervised learning (rather than unsupervised learning) using partially labeled seed entities. Experimental results show that the proposed method based on WS-LDA can accurately perform NERQ, and outperform the baseline methods. Previously proposed approaches to ad-hoc entity retrieval in the Web of Data (ERWD) used multi-fielded representation of entities and relied on standard unigram bag-of-words retrieval models. Although retrieval models incorporating term dependencies have been shown to be significantly more effective than the unigram bag-of-words ones for ad hoc document retrieval, it is not known whether accounting for term dependencies can improve retrieval from the Web of Data. In this work, we propose a novel retrieval model that incorporates term dependencies into structured document retrieval and apply it to the task of ERWD. In the proposed model, the document field weights and the relative importance of unigrams and bigrams are optimized with respect to the target retrieval metric using a learning-to-rank method. Experiments on a publicly available benchmark indicate significant improvement of the accuracy of retrieval results by the proposed model over state-of-the-art retrieval models for ERWD.