Using Encyclopedic Knowledge to Understand Queries

Query understanding is a challenging but beneficial task. In this paper, we propose a context-aware method to use the encyclopedic knowledge to aid in query understanding. Given a query, we first use a dictionary constructed from the encyclopedic knowledge bases to detect the possible entities and their associated categories. Then, we use a topic based ethod to derive semantic information from the query. By comparing the topical similarity between various candidate phrases, we get the most likely entities and their related categories. Experimental results show that our method has achieved a great improvement over previous approaches and the efficiency is acceptable for online search.