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The Impact of Named Entity Normalization on Information Retrieval for Question Answering

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4956))

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Abstract

In the named entity normalization task, a system identifies a canonical unambiguous referent for names like Bush or Alabama. Resolving synonymy and ambiguity of such names can benefit end-to-end information access tasks. We evaluate two entity normalization methods based on Wikipedia in the context of both passage and document retrieval for question anwering. We find that even a simple normalization method leads to improvements of early precision, both for document and passage retrieval. Moreover, better normalization results in better retrieval performance.

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Craig Macdonald Iadh Ounis Vassilis Plachouras Ian Ruthven Ryen W. White

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Khalid, M.A., Jijkoun, V., de Rijke, M. (2008). The Impact of Named Entity Normalization on Information Retrieval for Question Answering. In: Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Plachouras, V., Ruthven, I., White, R.W. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4956. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_83

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_83

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78645-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78646-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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