(everyone has to read this)
(mandatory if you choose this as your expertise topic)
Dalton, Jeffrey, Laura Dietz, and James Allan. “Entity query feature expansion using knowledge base links.” Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval. ACM, 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laura_Dietz2/publication/266658685_Entity_query_feature_expansion_using_knowledge_base_links/links/54413ad60cf2a6a049a56765.pdf
Xiong, Chenyan, and Jamie Callan. “Esdrank: Connecting query and documents through external semi-structured data.” Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 2015. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./callan/Papers/cikm15-cx.pdf
Raviv, Hadas, David Carmel, and Oren Kurland. “A ranking framework for entity oriented search using Markov random fields.” Proceedings of the 1st Joint International Workshop on Entity-Oriented and Semantic Search. ACM, 2012. http://sme.technion.ac.il/~kurland/entityMRF.pdf
Schuhmacher, Michael, Laura Dietz, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. “Ranking entities for web queries through text and knowledge.” Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 2015. https://ub-madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/39818/1/p1461-schuhmacher.pdf
Xiong, Chenyan, et al. “JointSem: Combining Query Entity Linking and Entity based Document Ranking.” Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 2017. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./callan/Papers/cikm15-cx.pdf
(if you want to know more, or read these if the other papers were to easy)
Dietz, Laura, Alexander Kotov, and Edgar Meij. “Utilizing Knowledge Graphs for Text-Centric Information Retrieval.” The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval. ACM, 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Kotov3/publication/313264939_Utilizing_Knowledge_Graphs_in_Text-centricInformation_Retrieval/links/5a84bdb84585159152b80ab9/Utilizing-Knowledge-Graphs-in-Text-centricInformation-Retrieval.pdf