Entity retrieval is a technique in IR that focuses on retrieving specific, identifiable entities such as people, places, organizations, or other unique concepts, instead of general content like documents or web pages. It involves recognizing and retrieving precise instances of entities based on user queries.
For example, when a user queries “Steve Jobs,” the system should return specific information about the person, rather than general documents containing the words “Steve” or “Jobs.” This requires systems to identify entities in the text, often using named entity recognition (NER) techniques.
Entity retrieval is commonly used in search engines, knowledge graphs, and question-answering systems, helping users find structured information about entities quickly and accurately.