Timely Semantics: A Study of a Stream-Based Ranking System for Entity Relationships

In recent years, search engines have started presenting semantically relevant entity information together with document search results. Entity ranking systems are used to compute recommendations for related entities that a user might also be interested to explore. Typically, this is done by ranking relationships between entities in a semantic knowledge graph using signals found in a data source as well as type annotations on the nodes and links of the graph. However, the process of producing these rankings can take a substantial amount of time. As a result, entity ranking systems typically lag behind real-world events and present relevant entities with outdated relationships to the search term or even outdated entities that should be replaced with more recent relations or entities. This paper presents a study using a real-world stream-processing based implementation of an entity ranking system, to understand the effect of data timeliness on entity rankings. We describe the system and the data it processes in detail. Using a longitudinal case-study, we demonstrate (i) that low-latency, large-scale entity relationship ranking is feasible using moderate resources and (ii) that stream-based entity ranking improves the freshness of related entities while maintaining relevance.