Using Wikipedia Categories and Links in Entity Ranking

This paper describes the participation of the INRIA group in the INEX 2007 XML entity ranking and ad hoc tracks. We developed a system for ranking Wikipedia entities in answer to a query. Our approach utilises the known categories, the link structure of Wikipedia, as well as the link co-occurrences with the examples (when provided) to improve the effectiveness of entity ranking. Our experiments on the training data set demonstrate that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia, together with entity examples, can significantly improve entity retrieval effectiveness. We also use our system for the ad hoc tasks by inferring target categories from the title of the query. The results were worse than when using a full-text search engine, which confirms our hypothesis that ad hoc retrieval and entity retrieval are two different tasks.