Entity Ranking and Relationship Queries using an Extended Graph Model

There is a large amount of textual data on the Web and in Wikipedia, where mentions of entities (such as Gandhi) are annotated with a link to the disambiguated entity (such as M. K. Gandhi). Such annotation may have been done manually (as in Wikipedia) or can be done using named entity recognition/disambiguation techniques. Such an annotated corpus allows queries to return entities, instead of documents. Entity ranking queries retrieve entities that are related to keywords in the query and belong to a given type/category specified in the query; entity ranking has been an active area of research in the past few years. More recently, there have been extensions to allow entity-relationship queries, which allow specification of multiple sets of entities as well as relationships between them. In this paper we address the problem of entity ranking (“near”) queries and entity-relationship queries on the Wikipedia corpus. We first present an extended graph model which combines the power of graph models used earlier for structured/semi-structured data, with information from textual data. Based on this model, we show how to specify entity and entity-relationship queries, and defined scoring methods for ranking answers. Finally, we provide efficient algorithms for answering such queries, exploiting a space efficient in-memory graph structure. A performance comparison with the ERQ system proposed earlier shows significant improvement in answer quality for most queries, while also handling a much larger set of entity types.