Entity Linking for Faroese Using Large Language Models with Web Search

Annika Simonsen, Iben Nyholm Debess, Hafsteinn Einarsson


Abstract
Entity linking connects text mentions to knowledge bases. For low-resource languages, entity linking has typically not been a research priority, as named entity recognition and knowledge base creation must first be addressed. We present the first study of entity linking for Faroese, a North Germanic language with approximately 70,000 speakers. Unlike traditional systems that rely on separate candidate retrieval and ranking components, we employ an end-to-end approach using GPT-5 with integrated web search. Our method prompts the model to directly identify and link named entities to Wikipedia pages through a three-tier fallback strategy: Faroese Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, and finally any available Wikipedia. We evaluate our approach on 1,010 manually annotated examples from a Faroese NER dataset, analyzing entity mentions across Person, Location, Organization, and Miscellaneous types. Human evaluation shows our system achieves 87.5% precision and 87.3% recall, with particularly strong performance on locations (93-95% precision, 92-95% recall). Persons are more challenging (86-88% precision, 72-83% recall). The majority of links (76.5%) point to Faroese Wikipedia, demonstrating the model’s ability to leverage language-specific knowledge bases. A Wikipedia API search baseline without any LLM achieves F1 = 0.57–0.60 on the same evaluation data, confirming that the LLM’s contextual reasoning provides substantial gains over simple search. We validate our approach across three models (GPT-5, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4 Mini), achieving F1 scores of 0.74–0.87 and confirming that the method generalizes across providers. This work establishes initial performance benchmarks for Faroese entity linking and demonstrates the viability of LLM-based approaches for low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.resourceful-4.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Felix Morger, Nikolai Ilinykh, Barbara Scalvini, Simon Dobnik, Dana Dannélls
Venues:
RESOURCEFUL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
32–43
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-resourceful-04
DOI:
10.63317/2myt23gboqw3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annika Simonsen, Iben Nyholm Debess, and Hafsteinn Einarsson. 2026. Entity Linking for Faroese Using Large Language Models with Web Search. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026), pages 32–43, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Entity Linking for Faroese Using Large Language Models with Web Search (Simonsen et al., RESOURCEFUL 2026)
Copy Citation: