An Entity-Topic Model for Entity Linking

Entity Linking (EL) has received considerable attention in recent years. Given many name mentions in a document, the goal of EL is to predict their referent entities in a knowledge base. Traditionally, there have been two distinct directions of EL research: one focusing on the effects of mention’s context compatibility, assuming that “the referent entity of a mention is reflected by its context”; the other dealing with the effects of document’s topic coherence, assuming that “a mention’s referent entity should be coherent with the document’s main topics”. In this paper, we propose a generative model – called entitytopic model, to effectively join the above two complementary directions together. By jointly modeling and exploiting the context compatibility, the topic coherence and the correlation between them, our model can accurately link all mentions in a document using both the local information (including the words and the mentions in a document) and the global knowledge (including the topic knowledge, the entity context knowledge and the entity name knowledge). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.