Coreference Aware Web Object Retrieval

As user demands become increasingly sophisticated, search engines today are competing in more than just returning document results from the Web. One area of competition is providing web object results from structured data extracted from a multitude of information sources. We address the problem of performing keyword retrieval over a collection of objects containing a large degree of duplication as different Web-based information sources provide descriptions of the same object. We develop a method for coreference aware retrieval that performs topic-specific coreference resolution on retrieved objects in order to improve object search results. Our results demonstrate that coreference has a significant impact on the effectiveness of retrieval in the domain of local search. Our results show that a coreference aware system outperforms naive object retrieval by more than 20% in P5 and P10.