A Scalable Gibbs Sampler for Probabilistic Entity Linking.

Entity linking involves labeling phrases in text with their referent entities, such as Wikipedia or Freebase entries. This task is challenging due to the large number of possible entities, in the millions, and heavy-tailed mention ambiguity. We formulate the problem in terms of probabilistic inference within a topic model, where each topic is associated with a Wikipedia article. To deal with the large number of topics we propose a novel efficient Gibbs sampling scheme which can also incorporate side information, such as the Wikipedia graph. This conceptually simple probabilistic approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in entity-linking on the Aida-CoNLL dataset.