People Search in the Enterprise dissertation abstract

The enormous increase in recent years in the amount of information available online has led to a renewed interest in a broad range of IR-related areas that go beyond plain document retrieval. Some of this new attention has fallen on a subset of IR tasks, in particular on entity retrieval tasks. This emerging area differs from traditional document retrieval in a number of ways. Entities are not represented directly (as retrievable units such as documents), and we need to identify them "indirectly" through occurrences in documents. This brings new, exciting challenges to the fields of Information Retrieval and Information Extraction. In this thesis we focus on one particular type of entity: people.