Linking to Web Knowledge Bases and Applications to Web Search

The development and availability of Web knowledge repositories, in particular Wikipedia, as the largest, inter-linked, and up-to-the-minute encyclopedic collection, have changed remarkably not only the way in which people fulfill their informational needs on the Web but also the way in which information can be organized and provided by Web search engines. The talk will focus on the task of entity extraction and linking to Wikipedia and other Web knowledge repositories. It will also cover work that employs such entity repositories in conjunction with query logs of commercial Web search engines to address Web information retrieval tasks such as context-aware search, query suggestion, question answering, retrieval of support for factual statements, and automatic aggregation of topic pages as an alternative to the ten blue links.