Semantic Search: from Names and Phrases
                            to Entities and Relations
                                                            – Invited speech –
                                                               Gerhard Weikum
                                                 Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
                                          Department of Databases and Information Systems
                                                  66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
                                                         weikum@mpi-inf.mpg.de

ABSTRACT
Web search is traditionally limited to keyword queries. In the era
of Big Data and the Web of Linked Data, one would expect that
schema-free search over both text and structured key-value pairs
becomes more semantic, Systems should, for example, identify
entities in queries and return crisp answers referring to facts, other
entities and relationships.
   Some of these desired advances are happening now; the Google
Knowledge Graph, Microsoft Entity Cube, and IBM’s Watson tech-
nology for question answering are examples. However, all these
systems still have major limitations when dealing with ambiguous
names and phrases that need to be mapped to entities and relations
in the underlying data and knowledge bases.
   This talk discusses recent and ongoing research on disambiguat-
ing names and phrases. The presented methods can boost the quality
and extent of semantic search, machine reading, knowledge harvest-
ing, and question answering over Web contents.

Speaker Short Bio
Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute
for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is
leading the department on databases and information systems.
   He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer
Science of Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, and he is
a principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal
Computing and Interaction.
   Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbruecken,
Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas,
and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Red-
mond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees
from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.




VLDS’12 August 31, 2012. Istanbul, Turkey.
Copyright c 2012 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying
permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and
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