WebEL: Improving Entity Linking with Extra Web Contexts

Entity Linking is the task of determining the identity of textual entity mentions given a predefined Knowledge Graph (KG). Plenty of existing efforts have been made on this task using either “local” information (contextual information of the mention in the text), or “global” information (relations among candidate entities). However, either local or global information might be insufficient especially when the given text is short. To get richer local and global information for entity linking, we propose to enrich the context information for mentions by getting extra contexts from the web through Web Search Engines. Based on the intuition above, two novel attempts are made. The first one adds web-searched results into an embedding-based method to expand the mention’s local information, where an attention mechanism is applied to help generate high-quality web contexts, while the second one uses the web contexts to extend the global information, i.e., finding and utilizing more extra relevant mentions from the web contexts with a graph-based model. Finally, we could combine the two models we proposed to use both extended local and global information from the extra web contexts. Our empirical study based on six real-world datasets shows that using extra web contexts to extend the local and global information could effectively improve the performance of entity linking.