This open access book surveys the progress in addressing selected challenges related to the growth of big data in combination with increasingly complicated hardware. It emerged from a research program established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as priority program SPP 1736 on Algorithmics for Big Data where researchers from theoretical computer science worked together with application experts in order to tackle problems in domains such as networking, genomics research, and information retrieval. Such domains are unthinkable without substantial hardware and software support, and these systems acquire, process, exchange, and store data at an exponential rate. The chapters of this volume summarize the results of projects realized within the program and survey-related work. This is an open access book.

This monograph provides a comprehensive overview of the broad area of semantic search on text and knowledge bases. In a nutshell, semantic search is ""search with meaning"". This ""meaning"" can refer to various parts of the search process: understanding the query (instead of just finding matches of its components in the data), understanding the data (instead of just searching it for such matches), or representing knowledge in a way suitable for meaningful retrieval. Semantic search is studied in a variety of different communities with a variety of different views of the problem. This book classifies this work according to two dimensions: the type of data (text, knowledge bases, combinations of these) and the kind of search (keyword, structured, natural language). All nine combinations are considered. The focus is on fundamental techniques, concrete systems, and benchmarks. The monograph also considers advanced issues: ranking, indexing, ontology matching and merging, and inference. It also provides a succinct overview of fundamental natural language processing techniques: POS-tagging, named-entity recognition and disambiguation, sentence parsing, and distributional semantics. Semantic Search on Text and Knowledge Bases is as self-contained as possible, and should thus also serve as a good tutorial for newcomers to this fascinating and highly topical field.