Problem Statement

Let's get acquainted with the task of building an entity linking system.

Introduction

Named entity linking (NEL) is the process of detecting and linking entity mentions in a given text to corresponding entities in a target knowledge base.

There are two parts to entity linking:

  1. Named-entity recognition

    Named-entity recognition (NER) detects and classifies potential named entities in the text into predefined categories such as a person, organization, location, medical code, time expression, etc. (multi-class prediction).

  2. Disambiguation

    Next, disambiguation disambiguates each detected entity by linking it to its corresponding entity in the knowledge base.

đź“ť The target knowledge base depends on the application, but for generic systems, a common choice is Wikidata or DBpedia.

Let’s see entity linking in action in the following example.

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