  We present a simple yet effective approach for linking entities in queries.
The key idea is to search sentences similar to a query from Wikipedia articles
and directly use the human-annotated entities in the similar sentences as
candidate entities for the query. Then, we employ a rich set of features, such
as link-probability, context-matching, word embeddings, and relatedness among
candidate entities as well as their related entities, to rank the candidates
under a regression based framework. The advantages of our approach lie in two
aspects, which contribute to the ranking process and final linking result.
First, it can greatly reduce the number of candidate entities by filtering out
irrelevant entities with the words in the query. Second, we can obtain the
query sensitive prior probability in addition to the static link-probability
derived from all Wikipedia articles. We conduct experiments on two benchmark
datasets on entity linking for queries, namely the ERD14 dataset and the GERDAQ
dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art
systems and yields 75.0% in F1 on the ERD14 dataset and 56.9% on the GERDAQ
dataset.
