Searching for individual entities: A query analysis

Searching for information about individual entities such as persons, locations, events, is an important activity in Internet search today, and is in its core a very semantic-oriented task. Several ways for accessing such information exist, but for locating entity-specific information, search engines are the most commonly used approach. In this context, keyword queries are the primary means of retrieving information about a specific entity. We believe that an important first step of performing such a task is to understand what type of entity the user is looking for. We call this process Entity Type Disambiguation. In this paper we present a Naive Bayesian Model for entity type disambiguation that explores our assumption that an entity type can be inferred from the attributes a user specifies in a search query. The model has been applied to queries provided by a large sample of participants in an experiment performing an entity search task. The beneficial impact of this approach for the development of new search systems is discussed.