38. A machine readable storage medium encoded with computer program code, wherein when the computer program code is executed by a processor, the processor performs a method comprising: (a) receiving an input query q including one or more keywords and one or more entity types; (b) searching a database D that indexes keywords and instances of entities having entity types in a collection of documents, the searching including searching for documents having the keywords and entities with the entity types in the input query (c) aggregating a respective score p o (q(t)) for each q(t) of a plurality of resultant entity tuples, where t consists of entities of the types in the input query, across the plurality of documents d in the database D, where p(d) is a discriminative measure of d and p(q(t)|d) a local score of q(t), as follows: p o ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) ) = p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | D ) = ∑ d ∈ D ⁢ ⁢ p ⁡ ( d ) · p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | d ) ; (d) normalizing 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; and (e) outputting a list, including a subset of the entity tuples having the highest normalized scores among the plurality of entity tuples, to a storage or display device or a network.
38. A machine readable storage medium encoded with computer program code, wherein when the computer program code is executed by a processor, the processor performs a method comprising: (a) receiving an input query q including one or more keywords and one or more entity types; (b) searching a database D that indexes keywords and instances of entities having entity types in a collection of documents, the searching including searching for documents having the keywords and entities with the entity types in the input query (c) aggregating a respective score p o (q(t)) for each q(t) of a plurality of resultant entity tuples, where t consists of entities of the types in the input query, across the plurality of documents d in the database D, where p(d) is a discriminative measure of d and p(q(t)|d) a local score of q(t), as follows: p o ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) ) = p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | D ) = ∑ d ∈ D ⁢ ⁢ p ⁡ ( d ) · p ⁡ ( q ⁡ ( t ) | d ) ; (d) normalizing 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; and (e) outputting a list, including a subset of the entity tuples having the highest normalized scores among the plurality of entity tuples, to a storage or display device or a network. 44. The machine readable storage medium of claim 38 , wherein each respective entity tuple in the output list is accompanied by a listing of a subset of the plurality of documents, from which that entity tuple is identified.