IR-977: (2014) Dalton, J.,  Dietz, L. and Allan, J., "Entity Query Feature Expansion using Knowledge Base Links," Proceedings of the 37th Annual International ACM SIGIR conference, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, July 6-11, 2014, pp. 365-374. [View bibtex]

Abstract

Recent advances in automatic entity linking and and knowledge base construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and query collections, using entities from large general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and Google's Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entities to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an ongoing area of research. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from entities and their links to knowledge bases, including both structured attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data. We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text expansion approaches.