Adapting Semantic Spreading Activation to Entity Linking in Text

The extraction and the disambiguation of knowledge guided by textual resources on the web is a crucial process to advance the Web of Linked Data. The goal of our work is to semantically enrich raw data by linking the mentions of named entities in the text to the corresponding known entities in knowledge bases. In our approach multiple aspects are considered: the prior knowledge of an entity in Wikipedia (i.e. the keyphraseness and commonness features that can be precomputed by crawling the Wikipedia dump), a set of features extracted from the input text and from the knowledge base, along with the correlation/relevancy among the resources in Linked Data. More precisely, this work explores the collective ranking approach formalized as a weighted graph model, in which the mentions in the input text and the candidate entities from knowledge bases are linked using the local compatibility and the global relatedness measures. Experiments on the datasets of the Open Knowledge Extraction (OKE) challenge with different configurations of our approach in each phase of the linking pipeline reveal its optimum mode. We investigate the notion of semantic relatedness between two entities represented as sets of neighbours in Linked Open Data that relies on an associative retrieval algorithm, with consideration of common neighbourhood. This measure improves the performance of prior link-based models and outperforms the explicit inter-link relevancy measure among entities (mostly Wikipedia-centric). Thus, our approach is resilient to non-existent or sparse links among related entities.