End-to-End Neural Entity Linking

Nikolaos Kolitsas, Octavian-Eugen Ganea, Thomas Hofmann


Abstract
Entity Linking (EL) is an essential task for semantic text understanding and information extraction. Popular methods separately address the Mention Detection (MD) and Entity Disambiguation (ED) stages of EL, without leveraging their mutual dependency. We here propose the first neural end-to-end EL system that jointly discovers and links entities in a text document. The main idea is to consider all possible spans as potential mentions and learn contextual similarity scores over their entity candidates that are useful for both MD and ED decisions. Key components are context-aware mention embeddings, entity embeddings and a probabilistic mention - entity map, without demanding other engineered features. Empirically, we show that our end-to-end method significantly outperforms popular systems on the Gerbil platform when enough training data is available. Conversely, if testing datasets follow different annotation conventions compared to the training set (e.g. queries/ tweets vs news documents), our ED model coupled with a traditional NER system offers the best or second best EL accuracy.
Anthology ID:
K18-1050
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, Ivan Titov
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
519–529
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1050
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K18-1050
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikolaos Kolitsas, Octavian-Eugen Ganea, and Thomas Hofmann. 2018. End-to-End Neural Entity Linking. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 519–529, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-End Neural Entity Linking (Kolitsas et al., CoNLL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1050.pdf
Code
 dalab/end2end_neural_el
Data
AIDA CoNLL-YAGOCoNLLIPM NEL