What’s New? Analysing Language-Specific Wikipedia Entity Contexts to Support Entity-Centric News Retrieval

Representation of influential entities, such as celebrities and multinational corporations on the web can vary across languages, reflecting language-specific entity aspects, as well as divergent views on these entities in different communities. An important source of multilingual background knowledge about influential entities is Wikipedia—an online community-created encyclopaedia—containing more than 280 language editions. Such language-specific information could be applied in entity-centric information retrieval applications, in which users utilise very simple queries, mostly just the entity names, for the relevant documents. In this article we focus on the problem of creating language-specific entity contexts to support entity-centric, language-specific information retrieval applications. First, we discuss alternative ways such contexts can be built, including Graph-based and Article-based approaches. Second, we analyse the similarities and the differences in these contexts in a case study including 219 entities and five Wikipedia language editions. Third, we propose a context-based entity-centric information retrieval model that maps documents to aspect space, and apply language-specific entity contexts to perform query expansion. Last, we perform a case study to demonstrate the impact of this model in a news retrieval application. Our study illustrates that the proposed model can effectively improve the recall of entity-centric information retrieval while keeping high precision, and provide language-specific results.