Semanticizing Search Engine Queries at ERD2014

This paper describes the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the short track of the Entity Recognition & Disambiguation Challenge 2014 (ERD 2014). We describe how we adapt the Semanticizer—an open-source entity linking framework developed primarily at the University of Amsterdam—to the task of the ERD challenge: linking named entities in search engine queries. We steer the Semanticizer’s linking towards named entities by adapting an existing training corpus, and extend the Semanticizer’s set of features with contextual features that aim to leverage the limited context provided by search queries. With an F1 score of 0.6062 our final system run achieves median performance, and better than mean performance (0.5329).