Entity Retrieval for Answering Entity-Centric Questions

Hassan Shavarani, Anoop Sarkar


Abstract
The similarity between the question and indexed documents is a key factor in document retrieval for retrieval-augmented question answering. Although this is typically the only method for obtaining the relevant documents, it is not the sole approach when dealing with entity-centric questions. We study Entity Retrieval, an alternative retrieval method, which rather than relying on question-document similarity, depends on the salient entities within the question to identify the retrieval documents. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the performance of both dense and sparse retrieval methods in comparison to Entity Retrieval. Our findings reveal the great potential of entity-driven methods for improving augmentation document retrieval in both accuracy and efficiency.
Anthology ID:
2025.knowledgenlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Knowledge-Augmented Methods for Natural Language Processing
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Weijia Shi, Wenhao Yu, Akari Asai, Meng Jiang, Greg Durrett, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer
Venues:
KnowledgeNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–17
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.knowledgenlp-1.1/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hassan Shavarani and Anoop Sarkar. 2025. Entity Retrieval for Answering Entity-Centric Questions. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Knowledge-Augmented Methods for Natural Language Processing, pages 1–17, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity Retrieval for Answering Entity-Centric Questions (Shavarani & Sarkar, KnowledgeNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.knowledgenlp-1.1.pdf