Bootstrapping Wikipedia to answer ambiguous person name queries

Toni Gruetze, Gjergji Kasneci, Zhe Zuo, Felix Naumann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

Some of the main ranking features of today's search engines reflect result popularity and are based on ranking models, such as PageRank, implicit feedback aggregation, and more. While such features yield satisfactory results for a wide range of queries, they aggravate the problem of search for ambiguous entities: Searching for a person yields satisfactory results only if the person in question is represented by a high-ranked Web page and all required information are contained in this page. Otherwise, the user has to either reformulate/refine the query or manually inspect low-ranked results to find the person in question. A possible approach to solve this problem is to cluster the results, so that each cluster represents one of the persons occurring in the answer set. However clustering search results has proven to be a difficult endeavor by itself, where the clusters are typically of moderate quality. A wealth of useful information about persons occurs in Web 2.0 platforms, such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Being human-generated, the information on these platforms is clean, focused, and already disambiguated. We show that when searching with ambiguous person names the information from Wikipedia can be bootstrapped to group the results according to the individuals occurring in them. We have evaluated our methods on a hand-labeled dataset of around 5,000 Web pages retrieved from Google queries on 50 ambiguous person names.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2014 IEEE 30th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2014
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages56-61
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781479934805
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event2014 IEEE 30th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2014 - Chicago, IL, United States
Duration: 31 Mar 20144 Apr 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering
ISSN (Print)1084-4627

Conference

Conference2014 IEEE 30th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago, IL
Period31/03/144/04/14

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Bootstrapping Wikipedia to answer ambiguous person name queries'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this