Entity-relationship queries over wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia is the largest user-generated knowledge base. We propose a structured query mechanism, entity-relationship query, for searching entities in Wikipedia corpus by their properties and inter-relationships. An entity-relationship query consists of arbitrary number of predicates on desired entities. The semantics of each predicate is specified with keywords. Entity-relationship query searches entities directly over text rather than pre-extracted structured data stores. This characteristic brings two benefits: (1) Query semantics can be intuitively expressed by keywords; (2) It avoids information loss that happens during extraction. We present a ranking framework for general entity-relationship queries and a position-based Bounded Cumulative Model for accurate ranking of query answers. Experiments on INEX benchmark queries and our own crafted queries show the effectiveness and accuracy of our ranking method.