Bag-of-Entities Representation for Ranking

This paper presents a new bag-of-entities representation for document ranking, with the help of modern knowledge bases and automatic entity linking. Our system represents query and documents by bag-of-entities vectors constructed from their entity annotations, and ranks documents by their matches with the query in the entity space. Our experiments with Freebase on TREC Web Track datasets demonstrate that current entity linking systems can provide sufficient coverage of the general domain search task, and that bag-of-entities representations outperform bag-of-words by as much as 18% in standard document ranking tasks.