This morning, we presented the last edition of our tutorial series on Entity Linking and Retrieval, entitled “Entity Linking and Retrieval for Semantic Search” (with Krisztian Balog and Daan Odijk) at WSDM 2014! This final edition of the series builds upon our earlier tutorials at WWW 2013 and SIGIR 2013. The focus of this edition lies on the practical applications of Entity Linking and Retrieval, in particular for semantic search: more and more search engine users are expecting direct answers to their information needs (rather than just documents). Semantic search and its recent applications are enabling search engines to organize their wealth of information around entities. Entity linking and retrieval is at the basis of these developments, providing the building stones for organizing the web of entities.

This tutorial aims to cover all facets of semantic search from a unified point of view and connect real-world applications with results from scientific publications. We provide a comprehensive overview of entity linking and retrieval in the context of semantic search and thoroughly explore techniques for query understanding, entity-based retrieval and ranking on unstructured text, structured knowledge repositories, and a mixture of these. We point out the connections between published approaches and applications, and provide hands-on examples on real-world use cases and datasets.

As before, all our tutorial materials are available for free online, see http://ejmeij.github.io/entity-linking-and-retrieval-tutorial/.