Suggesting Named Entities for Information Access

In interactive searching environments, robust linguistic techniques can provide sophisticated search assistance with a reasonable tolerance to errors, because users can easily select relevant items and dismiss the noisy bits. The general idea is that the combination of Language Engineering and Information Retrieval techniques can be used to suggest complex terms or relevant pieces of information to the user, facilitating query formulation and refinement when the information need is not completely defined a priori or when the user is not familiar with the contents and/or the terminology used in the collection. In this paper, we describe an interactive search engine that suggests Named Entities extracted automatically from the collection, and related to the initial query terms, helping users to filter and structure relevant information according to the persons, locations or other entities involved.