Entity Linking in Queries: Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

Identifying and disambiguating entity references in queries is one of the core enabling components for semantic search. While there is a large body of work on entity linking in documents, entity linking in queries poses new challenges due to the limited context the query provides coupled with the efficiency requirements of an online setting. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how to approach entity linking in queries, with a special focus on how to strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency. We divide the task of entity linking in queries to two main steps: candidate entity ranking and disambiguation, and explore both unsupervised and supervised alternatives for each step. Our main finding is that best overall performance (in terms of efficiency and effectiveness) can be achieved by employing supervised learning for the entity ranking step, while tackling disambiguation with a simple unsupervised algorithm. Using the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge platform, we further demonstrate that our recommended method achieves state-of-the-art performance.