Entity Summarization: State of the Art and Future Challenges

The increasing availability of semantic data, which is commonly represented as entity-property-value triples, has enabled novel information retrieval applications. However, the magnitude of semantic data, in particular the large number of triples describing an entity, could overload users with excessive amounts of information. This has motivated fruitful research on automated generation of summaries for entity descriptions to satisfy users' information needs efficiently and effectively. We focus on this important topic of entity summarization, and present the first comprehensive survey of existing research. We review existing methods and evaluation efforts, and suggest directions for future work.