With this dataset you can train, test, and benchmark entity linking systems on the task of linking web search queries – within the context of a search session – to entities. Entities are a key enabling component for semantic search, as many information needs can be answered by returning a list of entities, their properties, and/or their relations. A first step in any such scenario is to determine which entities appear in a query – a process commonly referred to as named entity resolution, named entity disambiguation, or semantic linking.

This dataset allows researchers and other practitioners to evaluate their systems for linking web search engine queries to entities. The dataset contains manually identified links to entities in the form of Wikipedia articles and provides the means to train, test, and benchmark such systems using manually created, gold standard data. With releasing this dataset publicly, we aim to foster research into entity linking systems for web search queries. To this end, we also include sessions and queries from the TREC Session track (years 2010–2013). Moreover, since the linked entities are aligned with a specific part of each query (a "span"), this data can also be used to evaluate systems that identify spans in queries, i.e, that perform query segmentation for web search queries, in the context of search sessions.

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