An Empirical Study of Learning to Rank for Entity Search

This work investigates the effectiveness of learning to rank methods for entity search. Entities are represented by multi-field documents constructed from their RDF triples, and field-based text similarity features are extracted for query-entity pairs. State-of-the-art learning to rank methods learn models for ad-hoc entity search. Our experiments on an entity search test collection based on DBpedia confirm that learning to rank methods are as powerful for ranking entities as for ranking documents, and establish a new state-of-the-art for accuracy on this benchmark dataset.