A Multilingual Test Collection for the Semantic Search of Entity Categories.

Humans naturally organise and classify the world into sets and categories. These categories expressed in natural language are present in all data artefacts from structured to unstructured data and play a fundamental role as tags, dataset predicates or ontology attributes. A better understanding of the category syntactic structure and how to match them semantically is a fundamental problem in the computational linguistics domain. Despite the high popularity of entity search, entity categories have not been receiving equivalent attention. This paper aims to present the task of semantic search of entity categories by defining, developing and making publicly available a multilingual test collection comprehending English, Portuguese and German. The test collections were designed to meet the demands of the entity search community in providing more representative and semantically complex query sets. In addition, we also provide comparative baselines and a brief analysis of the results.