Many realistic user tasks involve the retrieval of specific entities instead of just any type of documents. Examples of information
needs include ‘Countries where one can pay with the euro’ or ‘Impressionist art museums in The Netherlands’. The Initiative
for Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX) started the XML Entity Ranking track (INEX-XER) to create a test collection for entity
retrieval in Wikipedia. Entities are assumed to correspond to Wikipedia entries. The goal of the track is to evaluate how
well systems can rank entities in response to a query; the set of entities to be ranked is assumed to be loosely defined either
by a generic category (entity ranking) or by some example entities (list completion). This track overview introduces the track
setup, and discusses the implications of the new relevance notion for entity ranking in comparison to ad hoc retrieval.