Cross Language Entity Linking

There has been substantial recent interest in aligning mentions of named entities in unstructured texts to knowledge base descriptors, a task commonly called entity linking. This technology is crucial for applications in knowledge discovery and text data mining. This paper presents experiments in the new problem of cross language entity linking, where documents and named entities are in a different language than that used for the content of the reference knowledge base. We have created a new test collection to evaluate cross-language entity linking performance in twenty-one languages. We present experiments that examine issues such as: the importance of transliteration; the utility of cross-language information retrieval; and, the potential benefit of multilingual named entity recognition. Our best model achieves performance which is 94% of a strong monolingual baseline.