TREC Entity 2010 overview
The TREC Entity 2010 overview paper is now available online. We will soon start the discussion about the 2011 edition on the track’s mailing list.
Yahoo! Semantic Search Challenge
The 3rd Semantic Search Workshop (SemSearch’10) organized an Entity Search Challenge last year (see my notes from the event). This competition is being organized this year again. There are two tasks: entity search (queries refer to a particular entity) and list search (complex queries with multiple possible answers). The collection is the Billion Triple Challenge 2009 (BTC-2009) data set, which is the same as last year. Also, this is the data set we used at the TREC Entity track in 2010. So I encourage all TREC Entity participants to take part, and vice versa.
There is even cash price of $500 offered by Yahoo! for the winner of each task; it’s more of a symbolic reward than a real remuneration 
but anyways, it’s not the money we academics are after, is it?
The submission deadline is Mar 21. For more details see:
TREC Entity related developments
There has been a lot of silence on this blog since May. This is not because I have too little to say, but I have too much to do 
A lot of effort has gone into organizing the TREC Entity track; those who are interested could follow developments on the track’s mailing list and blog. Topics are available for both the main (Related Entity Finding) and for the pilot (Entity List Completion) tasks. Developing topics for the latter involved some engineering work that I think might be worth sharing; I’m planning to do so, but don’t take it as a promise.
Another Entity track related development is that Marc Bron, Maarten de Rijke and myself have a paper accepted at CIKM 2010. In this paper, we propose a generative modeling framework for addressing the related entity finding (REF) task and perform a detailed analysis of four core components; co-occurrence models, type filtering, context modeling and homepage finding. Check out the abstract or the full paper. We made a number of resources used in the paper available to help others to repeat and improve upon our experiments.
TREC Entity 2010 draft guidelines
The draft guidelines for the 2010 edition of the track have been posted on the track’s website.
In 2010, Related Entity Finding (REF) runs as the main task of the track. A number of changes has been made to the previous edition. We also attempted to clarify issues, such as what is and what is not an entity homepage.
In addition, the track introduces a second challenge, entity list completion (ELC), which will run as a pilot task.
Your feedback is not only welcomed, but encouraged! Post them as comments on the guidelines page or send them to the mailing list.