Using Wikipedia's category structure for entity search

In this paper we investigate how the category structure of Wikipedia can be exploited for Entity Ranking. In the last decade, theWeb has not only grown in size, but also changed its character, due to collaborative content creation and an increasing amount of structure. Current Search Engines find Web pages rather than information or knowledge, and leave it to the searchers to locate the sought information within the Web page. A considerable fraction of Web searches con-tains named entities. We focus on how the Wikipedia struc-ture can help rank relevant entities directly in response to a search request, rather than retrieve an unorganized list of Web pages with relevant but also potentially redundant in-formation about these entities. Our results demonstrate the benefi of using topical and link structure over the use of shallow statistics. This paper is a compressed version of [1].