Improving "entity linking" between texts and knowledge bases

Entity linking (EL) is the process of automatically linking entity mentions in text to the corresponding entries in a knowledge base (a database of facts that relate entities), such as Wikidata. For example, in the diagram below, we would aim to link the mention "England" to the entity "England Football Team" as opposed to the entity "England" the country. Entity linking is a common first step in natural-language-processing (NLP) applications such as question answering, information extraction, and natural-language understanding. It is critical for bridging unstructured text with knowledge bases, which enables access to vast amounts of curated data. Current EL systems exhibit great performance on standard datasets, but they have several limitations when deployed in real-world applications.