Synonyms
Entity search
Definition
Entities are uniquely identifiable objects or things (such as persons, organizations, and places), characterized by their types, attributes, and relationships to other entities. Entity retrieval refers to a variety of search tasks where the user is presented with specific entities, or properties of entities, instead of documents, in response to a search query.
The area of entity retrieval has a number of unique characteristics that makes it challenging and sets it apart from standard document retrieval. First, unlike documents, entities are not necessarily directly represented as retrievable units but need to be recognized and identified through occurrences in documents. Information about a given entity has to be collected and aggregated from multiple documents and even multiple collections and potentially combined with structured data sources. Second, there is more structure (or references to structures) available than in standard document retrieval:...
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Balog, K. (2018). Entity Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80724
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