28. A system comprising: at least one processor, said at least one processor being coupled to access a document database D that indexes keywords and instances of entities having entity types in a plurality of documents; said at least one processor being configured to receive an input query q including one or more keywords and one or more entity types, and search the database for documents having the keywords and entities with the entity types of the input query; said at least one processor configured for aggregating a respective score for each q(t) of a plurality of entity tuples across the plurality of documents d in database D, as follows, based on respective weight p(d) assigned to each respective document d and local score p(q(t)|d), p o ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) ) = p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | D ) = ∑ d ∈ D ⁢ ⁢ p ⁡ ( d ) · p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | d ) said at least one processor configured to normalize the aggregated scores by statistically validating the significance of said score over the database, each respective normalized score providing a ranking of a respective entity tuple, relative to other entity tuples, as an answer to the input query; said at least one processor having an interface to a storage or display device or network for outputting a list including a subset of the entity tuples having the highest normalized scores among the plurality of entity tuples.
36. The system of claim 28 , wherein: the processor is communicatively coupled with a network, the plurality of documents are stored in a plurality of computers accessed by way of the network using uniform resource identifiers, and for each respective entity tuple, the list includes the respective uniform resource identifiers for each respective document in the subset of the plurality of documents.