CohEEL: Coherent and efficient named entity linking through random walks

In recent years, the ever-growing amount of documents on the Web as well as in digital libraries led to a considerable increase of valuable textual information about entities. Harvesting entity knowledge from these large text collections is a major challenge. It requires the linkage of textual mentions within the documents with their real-world entities. This process is called entity linking.Solutions to this entity linking problem have typically aimed at balancing the rate of linking correctness (precision) and the linking coverage rate (recall). While entity links in texts could be used to improve various Information Retrieval tasks, such as text summarization, document classification, or topic-based clustering, the linking precision is the decisive factor. For example, for topic-based clustering a method that produces mostly correct links would be more desirable than a high-coverage method that leads to more but also more uncertain clusters.We propose an efficient linking method that uses a random walk strategy to combine a precision-oriented and a recall-oriented classifier in such a way that a high precision is maintained, while recall is elevated to the maximum possible level without affecting precision. An evaluation on three datasets with distinct characteristics demonstrates that our approach outperforms seminal work in the area and shows higher precision and time performance than the most closely related state-of-the-art methods.