An analysis of real query logs from a commercial search engine shows that the intention of more than half of Web queries is to find a particular entity, or entities of a particular type. This problem of entity retrieval, or more generally, semantic search, has received increasing research attention from both the Information Retrieval (IR) and Semantic Web communities. Beyond the traditional text-based retrieval problem, the recent surge in entity-centered structured data on the Web such as Wikidata enables more powerful entity retrieval solutions, but also brings new challenges. This hybrid of unstructured and structured retrieval has led to diversified research from not only the IR community but also researchers and practitioners in the areas of Database, Semantic Web, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This workshop series provides a platform where interdisciplinary studies of entity retrieval 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.