Entity Linking on Philosophical Documents

Entity Linking consists in automatically enriching a document by detecting the text fragments mentioning a given entity in an external knowledge base, e.g., Wikipedia. This problem is a hot research topic due to its impact in several text-understanding related tasks. However, its application to some specific, restricted topic domains has not received much attention. In this work we study how we can improve entity linking performance by exploiting a domain-oriented knowledge base, obtained by filtering out from Wikipedia the entities that are not relevant for the target domain. We focus on the philosophical domain, and we experiment a combination of three different entity filtering approaches: one based on the “Philosophy” category of Wikipedia, and two based on similarity metrics between philosophical documents and the textual description of the entities in the knowledge base, namely cosine similarity and Kullback-Leibler divergence. We apply traditional entity linking strategies to the domainoriented knowledge base obtained with these filtering techniques. Finally, we use the resulting enriched documents to conduct a preliminary user study with an expert in the area.