30th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2008, Glasgow, UK, March 30-April 3, 2008 : proceedings
ISBN
9783540786450
ISBN (electronic)
9783540786467
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Event
30th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2008), Glasgow, UK
Pages (from-to)
705-710
Publisher
Berlin: Springer
Organisations
Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Informatics Institute (IVI)
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.
