Entity Ranking for Queries with Modifiers Based on Knowledge Bases and Web Search Results

Abstract

This paper proposes methods of finding a ranked list of entities for a given query (e.g. “Kennin-ji”, “Tenryu-ji”, or “Kinkaku-ji” for the query “ancient zen buddhist temples in kyoto”) by leveraging different types of modifiers in the query through identifying corresponding properties (e.g. established date and location for the modifiers “ancient” and “kyoto”, respectively). While most major search engines provide the entity search functionality that returns a list of entities based on users' queries, entities are neither presented for a wide variety of search queries, nor in the order that users expect. To enhance the effectiveness of entity search, we propose two entity ranking methods. Our first proposed method is a Web-based entity ranking that directly finds relevant entities from Web search results returned in response to the query as a whole, and propagates the estimated relevance to the other entities. The second proposed method is a property-based entity ranking that ranks entities based on properties corresponding to modifiers in the query. To this end, we propose a novel property identification method that identifies a set of relevant properties based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using our seven criteria that are effective for different types of modifiers. The experimental results showed that our proposed property identification method could predict more relevant properties than using each of the criteria separately. Moreover, we achieved the best performance for returning a ranked list of relevant entities when using the combination of the Web-based and property-based entity ranking methods.