Cross-Language Entity Linking in Maryland during a Hurricane

Our team from the JHUHLTCOE and the University of Maryland submitted runs for all three variants of the TACKBP entity linking task. For the monolingual tasks, we essentially mirrored our HLTCOETAC-KBP 2010 submission, making only modest changes to accommodate differences in 2011, namely the requirement to cluster NIL responses, and the change in evaluation measure. However, our work on the cross-lingual task was significantly more involved, requiring development of robust, multiphased transliteration software, use of techniques in cross-language information retrieval, and reliance on a Chinese-to- English statistical machine translation system. In this paper we describe our work for the 2011 evaluation and the results we obtained.