Finding Related Entities by Retrieving Relations: UIUC at TREC 2009 Entity Track

Our goal in participating in the TREC 2009 Entity Track was to study whether relation extraction techniques can help in improving accuracy of the entity ???nding task. Finding related entities is informational in nature and we wanted to explore if inducing structure on the queries helps satisfy this information need. The research outlook we took was to study techniques that retrieve relations between two entities from a large corpus, and from those, ???nd the most relevant entities that participate in the given relation with another given entity. Instead of aiming at retrieving pages about speci???c entities, we tried to address the problem of directly ???nding the entities from the text. Our experimental results show that we were able to ???nd many related entities using relation-based extraction, and ranking entities based on further evidence from the text helps to a certain extent.published or submitted for publicatio