A Supervised Learning Approach to Entity Search

  • Guoping Hu ,
  • JJ (Jingjing) Liu ,
  • Hang Li ,
  • Yunbo Cao ,
  • Jian-Yun Nie ,

AIRS 2006 |

In this paper we address the problem of entity search. Expert search and time search are used as examples. In entity search, given a query and an entity type, a search system returns a ranked list of entities in the type (e.g., person name, time expression) relevant to the query. Ranking is a key issue in entity search. In the literature, only expert search was studied and the use of co-occurrence was proposed. In general, many features may be useful for ranking in entity search. We propose using a linear model to combine the uses of different features and employing a supervised learning approach in training of the model. Experimental results on several data sets indicate that our method significantly outperforms the baseline method based solely on co-occurrences.