Relational Inference for Wikification

Wikification, commonly referred to as Disambiguation to Wikipedia (D2W), is the task of identifying concepts and entities in text and disambiguating them into the most specific corresponding Wikipedia pages. Previous approaches to D2W focused on the use of local and global statistics over the given text, Wikipedia articles and its link structures, to evaluate context compatibility among a list of probable candidates. However, these methods fail (often, embarrassingly), when some level of text understanding is needed to support Wikification. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to Wikification by incorporating, along with statistical methods, richer relational analysis of the text. We provide an extensible, efficient and modular Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation of Wikification that incorporates the entity-relation inference problem, and show that the ability to identify relations in text helps both candidate generation and ranking Wikipedia titles considerably. Our results show significant improvements in both Wikification and the TAC Entity Linking task.