Concordance-Based Entity-Oriented Search

— We consider the problem of finding the relevant named entities in response to a search query over a given text corpus. Entity search can readily be used to augment conventional web search engines for a variety of applications. To assess the significance of entity search, we analyzed the AOL dataset of 36 million web search queries with respect to two different sets of entities: namely (a) 2.3 million distinct entities extracted from a news text corpus and (b) 2.9 million Wikipedia article titles. The results clearly indicate that search engines should be aware of entities, for under various criteria of matching between 18-39% of all web search queries can be recognized as specifically searching for entities, while 73-87% of all queries contain entities. Our entity search engine creates a concordance document for each entity, consisting of all the sentences in the corpus containing that entity. We then index and search these documents using open-source search software. This gives...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WEBI
• Authors: Mikhail Bautin, Steven Skiena
• Keywords: Entities, Entity Search, Internet Technology, Search Engine, WEBI 2007