Many keyword queries issued to Web search engines target information about real world entities, and interpreting these queries over Web knowledge bases can often enable the search system to provide exact answers to queries. Equally important is the problem of detecting when the reference knowledge base is not capable of answering the keyword query, due to lack of domain coverage. In this work we present an approach to computing structured representations of keyword queries over a reference

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... edge base. We mine frequent query structures from a Web query log and map these structures into a reference knowledge base. Our approach exploits coarse linguistic structure in keyword queries, and combines it with rich structured query representations of information needs.