WBSG at TAC-KBP 2011

This paper reports the participation of team WBSG in the English entity-linking task at TAC KBP 2011. As first-timers in TAC, we used the opportunity to test the entity linking accuracy of our general-purpose entity and concept annotation system. Our system, DBpedia Spotlight, does not specialize on named entities of certain types. Its aim is to annotate any of the ≈3.5M entities and other concepts in DBpedia, a knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia. We applied the disambiguation step of our algorithm as is, without benefiting from the a priori knowledge of target entity types, and without applying specialized NIL detection or clustering approaches. We simply mapped our KB to that of TAC KBP’s, and labelled as NIL the entities from the former that were absent from the latter. Our simple approach worked surprisingly well, achieving 0.703 B F1. In future work we plan to specialize our algorithm to the entity types in TAC KBP, and investigate in which cases a larger KB provided us an advantage or disadvantage in the context of this evaluation.