Leveraging Knowledge Bases for Contextual Entity Exploration

Users today are constantly switching back and forth from applications where they consume or create content (such as e-books and productivity suites like Microsoft Office and Google Docs) to search engines where they satisfy their information needs. Unfortunately, though, this leads to a suboptimal user experience as the search engine lacks any knowledge about the content that the user is authoring or consuming in the application. As a result, productivity suites are starting to incorporate features that let the user "explore while they work". Existing work in the literature that can be applied to this problem takes a standard bag-of-words information retrieval approach, which consists of automatically creating a query that includes not only the target phrase or entity chosen by the user but also relevant terms from the context. While these approaches have been successful, they are inherently limited to returning results (documents) that have a syntactic match with the keywords in the query. We argue that the limitations of these approaches can be overcome by leveraging semantic signals from a knowledge graph built from knowledge bases such as Wikipedia. We present a system called Lewis for retrieving contextually relevant entity results leveraging a knowledge graph, and perform a large scale crowdsourcing experiment in the context of an e-reader scenario, which shows that Lewis can outperform the state-of-the-art contextual entity recommendation systems by more than 20% in terms of the MAP score.