An Entity-Oriented Approach for Answering Topical Information Needs

Shubham Chatterjee

Abstract: In this dissertation, we adopt an entity-oriented approach to identify relevant materials for answering a topical keyword query such as “Cholera”. To this end, we study the interplay between text and entities by addressing three related prediction problems: (1) Identify knowledge base entities that are relevant for the query, (2) Understand an entity’s meaning in the context of the query, and (3) Identify text passages that elaborate the connection between the query and an entity. Through this dissertation, we aim to study some overarching questions in entity-oriented research such as the importance of query-specific entity descriptions, and the importance of entity salience and context-dependent entity similarity for modeling the query-specific context of an entity.