Purpose – This work aims to investigate the sensitivity of ranking performance with respect to the topic distribution of queries selected for ranking evaluation. Design/methodology/approach – The authors reweight queries used in two TREC tasks to make them match three real background topic...

Searching for information about individual entities such as persons, locations, events, is an important activity in Internet search today, and is in its core a very semantic-oriented task. Several ways for accessing such information exist, but for locating entity-specific information, search...