Improving entity ranking for keyword queries

Abstract

Knowledge bases about entities are an important part of modern information retrieval systems. A strong ranking of entities can be used to enhance query understanding and document retrieval or can be presented as another vertical to the user. Given a keyword query, our task is to provide a ranking of the entities present in the collection of interest. We are particularly interested in approaches to this problem that generalize to different knowledge bases and different collections. In the past, this kind of problem has been explored in the enterprise domain through Expert Search. Recently, a dataset was introduced for entity ranking from news and web queries from more general TREC collections. Approaches from prior work leverage a wide variety of lexical resources: e.g., natural language processing and relations in the knowledge base. We address the question of whether we can achieve competitive performance with minimal linguistic resources. We propose a set of features that do not require index-time entity linking, and demonstrate competitive performance on the new dataset. As this paper is the first non-introductory work to leverage this new dataset, we also find and correct certain aspects of the benchmark. To support a fair evaluation, we collect 38% more judgments and contribute annotator agreement information.