Multilingual Entity Linking: Comparing English and Spanish

The Entity Linking (EL) task is concerned with linking entity mentions in a text collection with their corresponding knowledgebase entries. The majority of approaches have focused on EL over English text collections. However, some approaches propose language-independent or multilingual approaches to perform EL over texts in many languages. In this paper, our goal is to see how well EL systems perform outside of the primary language (often English). We first provide a survey of EL approaches that present evaluation over multiple languages. We then provide results of an initial study comparing selected entity linking APIs for equivalent documents and sentences in English and Spanish. Multilingual EL approaches fare best for Spanish, though all approaches still perform better for English text than the corresponding Spanish text. This indicates that there is an important gap between EL techniques for English in relation to Spanish (and possibly for many other languages) which has not been addressed yet. However, we leave investigation of the causes of this gap for future work, which could be due to many factors, for example, to differences in existing multilingual knowledge bases.