Entity-oriented Search

The book is divided into three main parts, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters. The first two chapters introduce readers to the basic concepts, provide an overview of entity-oriented search tasks, and present the various types and sources of data that will be used throughout the book. Part I deals with the core task of entity ranking: given a textual query, possibly enriched with additional elements or structural hints, return a ranked list of entities. This core task is examined in a number of different variants, using both structured and unstructured data collections, and numerous query formulations. In turn, Part II is devoted to the role of entities in bridging unstructured and structured data. Part III explores how entities can enable search engines to understand the concepts, meaning, and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and how they can provide rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents)—a process known as semantic search. The final chapter concludes the book by discussing the limitations of current approaches, and suggesting directions for future research.

Krisztian Balog is a full professor of Computer Science, heading the Information Access and Interaction (IAI) group at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Stavanger. His general research interests lie in the use and development of information retrieval, information extraction, and machine learning techniques for intelligent information access tasks, and his current emphasis is on entity-oriented and semantic search, and novel evaluation methodologies. His work on entity retrieval has been very influential and has received numerous awards.