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

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Mahboob Alam Khalid, Valentin Jijkoun, Maarten de Rijke
• Keywords: ECIR 2008, Entity Normalization, Entity Normalization Task, Information Technology, Normalization Method