The Impact of Named Entity Normalization on Information Retrieval for Question Answering
Mahboob Alam Khalid, Valentin Jijkoun, Maarten de Rijke · 2008
Abstract. In the named entity normalization task, a system iden-tifies a canonical unambiguous referent for names like Bush or Al-abama. Resolving synonymy and ambiguity of such names can ben-efit end-to-end information access tasks. We evaluate two entity normalization methods based on Wikipedia in the context of both passage and document retrieval for question answering. We find that even a simple normalization method leads to improvements of early precision, both for document and passage retrieval. Moreover, better normalization results in better retrieval performance. 1