entity linking

ICTIR 2016 paper online

“Exploiting Entity Linking in Queries for Entity Retrieval,” an upcoming ICTIR 2016 paper by Faegheh Hasibi, Svein Erik Bratsberg, and myself is available online now, along with the source code.

The premise of entity retrieval is to better answer search queries by returning specific entities instead of documents. Many queries mention particular entities; recognizing and linking them to the corresponding entry in a knowledge base is known as the task of entity linking in queries. In this paper we make a first attempt at bringing together these two, i.e., leveraging entity annotations of queries in the entity retrieval model. We introduce a new probabilistic component and show how it can be applied on top of any term-based entity retrieval model that can be emulated in the Markov Random Field framework, including language models, sequential dependence models, as well as their fielded variations. Using a standard entity retrieval test collection, we show that our extension brings consistent improvements over all baseline methods, includ- ing the current state-of-the-art. We further show that our extension is robust against parameter settings.

Update (16/09): Our paper received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the conference. So it is definitely worth checking out ;)

ECIR’16 contributions

Last Sunday, Anne Schuth and I gave a tutorial on Living Labs for Online Evaluation. The tutorial’s homepage contains all the slides and reference material.

Experimental evaluation has always been central to Information Retrieval research. The field is increasingly moving towards online evaluation, which involves experimenting with real, unsuspecting users in their natural task environments, a so-called living lab. Specifically, with the recent introduction of the Living Labs for IR Evaluation initiative at CLEF and the OpenSearch track at TREC, researchers can now have direct access to such labs. With these benchmarking platforms in place, we believe that online evaluation will be an exciting area to work on in the future. This half-day tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the underlying theory and complement it with practical guidance.

Today, Faegheh Hashibi is presenting our work on the reproducibility of the TAGME Entity Linking System. The full paper and resources for this work are available online.

Among the variety of approaches proposed for entity linking, the TAGME system has gained due attention and is considered a must-have baseline. In this paper, we examine the repeatability, reproducibility, and generalizability of TAGME, by comparing results obtained from its public API with (re)implementations from scratch. We find that the results reported in the paper cannot be repeated due to unavailability of data sources. Part of the results are reproducible only through the provided API, while the rest are not reproducible. We further show that the TAGME approach is generalizable to the task of entity linking in queries. Finally, we provide insights gained during this process and formulate lessons learned to inform future reducibility efforts.

ICTIR 2015 paper online

“Entity Linking in Queries: Tasks and Evaluation,” an upcoming ICTIR 2015 paper by Faegheh Hasibi, Svein Erik Bratsberg, and myself is available online now. The resources developed within this study are also made publicly available.

Annotating queries with entities is one of the core problem areas in query understanding. While seeming similar, the task of entity linking in queries is different from entity linking in documents and requires a methodological departure due to the inherent ambiguity of queries. We differentiate between two specific tasks, semantic mapping and interpretation finding, discuss current evaluation methodology, and propose refinements. We examine publicly available datasets for these tasks and introduce a new manually curated dataset for interpretation finding. To further deepen the understanding of task differences, we present a set of approaches for effectively addressing these tasks and report on experimental results.