Wikification and Beyond: The Challenges of Entity and Concept Grounding

Contextual disambiguation and grounding of concepts and entities in natural language text are essential to moving forward in many natural language understanding related tasks and are fundamental to many applications. The Wikification task (Bunescu and Pasca, 2006; Mihalcea and Csomai, 2007; Ratinov et al., 2011) aims at automatically identifying concept mentions appearing in a text document and link it to (or “ground it in”) a concept referent in a knowledge base (KB) (e.g., Wikipedia). For example, consider the sentence, "The Times report on Blumental (D) has the potential to fundamentally reshape the contest in the Nutmeg State.", a Wikifier should identify the key entities and concepts (Times, Blumental, D and the Nutmeg State), and disambiguate them by mapping them to an encyclopedic resource revealing, for example, that “D” here represents the Democratic Party, and that “the Nutmeg State” refers Connecticut.