Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base
construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and
query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large
general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google
Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity
annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open
research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to
improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion
approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this
paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature
expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from
entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured
attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity
annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC
text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity
links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data.
We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant
improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text
expansion approaches
