Entity linking with distributional semantics

Abstract

Entity Linking (EL) consists in linking name mentions in a given text with their referring entities in external knowledge bases such as DBpedia/Wikipedia. In this paper, we propose an EL approach whose main contribution is to make use of a knowledge base built by means of distributional similarity. More precisely, Wikipedia is transformed into a manageable database structured with similarity relations between entities. Our EL method is focused on a specific task, namely semantic annotation of documents by extracting those relevant terms that are linked to nodes in DBpedia/Wikipedia. The method is currently working for four languages. The Portuguese and English versions have been evaluated and compared against other EL systems, showing competitive range, close to the best systems.