Example Based Entity Search in the Web of Data

The scale of today's Web of Data motivates the use of keyword search-based approaches to entity-oriented search tasks in addition to traditional structure-based approaches, which require users to have knowledge of the underlying schema. We propose an alternative structure-based approach that makes use of example entities and compare its effectiveness with a text-based approach in the context of an entity list completion task. We find that both the text and structure-based approaches are effective in retrieving relevant entities, but that they find different sets of entities. Additionally, we find that the performance of the structure-based approach is dependent on the quality and number of example entities given. We experiment with a number of hybrid techniques that balance between the two approaches and find that a method that uses the example entities to determine the weights of approaches in the combination on a per query basis is most effective.