Towards Better Entity Linking Evaluation

The Entity Linking (EL) task is concerned with linking entity mentions in a text collection with their corresponding knowledge-base entries. Despite the progress made in the evaluation of EL systems, there is still much work to be done, where this Ph.D. research tackles issues concerning EL evaluation. Among these issues, we stress (a) the lack of consensus about the definition of “entity” and the lack of evaluation metrics that allow for different notions of entities, (b) the lack of datasets that allow for cross-language comparison, and (c) the focus on evaluating high-level systems rather than low-level techniques. By addressing these challenges and better understanding the performance of EL systems, our hypothesis is that we can create a more general, more configurable EL framework that can be better adapted to the needs of a particular application. In the early stages of this PhD work, we have identified these problems and begun to address (a) and (b), publishing initial results that constitute a significant step forward in our investigation. However, there are still further challenges that must be addressed before we reach our goal. Our next steps thus involve proposing a more fluid definition of “entity” adaptable to different applications, the definition of quality measures that allow for comparing EL approaches targeting different types of entities, as well as the creation of a customizable EL framework that allows for composing and evaluating individual techniques as appropriate to a particular task.