Previous analysis of real query logs shows that the intention of more than half of Web queries is to find a particular entity, find entities of a particular type, or find values of a particular attribute of an entity. This problem of entity retrieval, or more generally, semantic search, has received increasing research attention from the Information Retrieval (IR) and Semantic Web communities, using text (e.g., webpages) and structured data (e.g., RDF, Wikidata), respectively. This hybrid of unstructured and structured retrieval is appealing to researchers and practitioners in the areas of IR, Database, Semantic Web, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This workshop series is a venue to bridge different communities and develop a renewed interest. It provides a platform where interdisciplinary studies of entity retrieval and semantic search can be presented, and focused discussions can take place.
We also organize two shared tasks related to entity retrieval, in order to assess strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, compare performance of techniques, and enhance communication among researchers and developers.