Avatar semantic search: a database approach to information retrieval

We present Avatar Semantic Search, a prototype search engine that exploits annotations in the context of classical keyword search. The process of annotations is accomplished offline by using high-precision information extraction techniques to extract facts, con-cepts, and relationships from text. These facts and concepts are represented and indexed in a structured data store. At runtime, keyword queries are interpreted in the context of these extracted facts and converted into one or more precise queries over the structured store. In this demonstration we describe the overall architecture of the Avatar Semantic Search engine. We also demonstrate the superiority of the AVATAR approach over traditional keyword search engines using Enron email data set and a blog corpus.