Evaluating the helpfulness of linked entities to readers

When we encounter an interesting entity (e.g., a person's name or a geographic location) while reading text, we typically search and retrieve relevant information about it. Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking entities in a text to the corresponding entries in a knowledge base, such as Wikipedia. Recently, EL has received considerable attention. EL can be used to enhance a user's text reading experience by streamlining the process of retrieving information on entities. Several EL methods have been proposed, though they tend to extract all of the entities in a document including unnecessary ones for users. Excessive linking of entities can be distracting and degrade the user experience. In this paper, we propose a new method for evaluating the helpfulness of linking entities to users. We address this task using supervised machine-learning with a broad set of features. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms baseline methods by approximately 5.7%-12% F1. In addition, we propose an application, Linkify, which enables developers to integrate EL easily into their web sites.