A Method for Searching Documents using Knowledge Bases

We propose a document search method using knowledge bases (KBs) to explore documents through mentioned entities and their relationship. Documents are one of the most popular media to accumulate and transmit information. People often want to search for necessary documents or explore necessary information across multiple documents. However, it is generally difficult to find the target documents (or information) in particular when the search conditions are complicated, or the conditions are implicitly represented. Thus, users cannot represent their information needs in terms of a query, such as keywords. To address this problem, we exploit knowledge bases (KBs). More precisely, we extract entities mentioned in the documents and link them with the KBs, allowing users to explore the documents through the entities and their relationships. Furthermore, we propose a user-friendly interface to query documents and the relevant information. We experimentally show the proposed system performs better than the search system with a popular full-text search engine in some search tasks.