Entity Linking

Recognizing and disambiguating entities is a key step towards understanding the meaning of a text. Entity linking refers to the task of idenifying entity mentions in text and linking them to the corresponding entries in a reference knowledge base. Entity annotations allow readers of a document to acquire contextual or background information with a single click. They can also be used in downstream processing to improve retrieval performance or to facilitate better user interaction with documents or search results, e.g., by providing easy access to related entities. Most entity linking approaches can be seen as a pipeline of three main steps: (i) mention detection, to determine “linkable” phrases, (ii) link generation, to rank and/or selects candidate entities for each mention, and (iii) disambiguation, to select, with the help of context, a single entity (or none) for each mention. The course consists of two lectures. The first lecture introduces theory and methods. The second lecture provides practical guidance with hands-on examples and exercises.