VoxEL: A benchmark dataset for multilingual entity linking

Abstract

The Entity Linking (EL) task identifies entity mentions in a text corpus and associates them with corresponding entities in a given knowledge base. While traditional EL approaches have largely focused on English texts, current trends are towards language-agnostic or otherwise multilingual approaches that can perform EL over texts in many languages. One of the obstacles to ongoing research on multilingual EL is a scarcity of annotated datasets with the same text in different languages. In this work we thus propose VoxEL: a manually-annotated gold standard for multilingual EL featuring the same text expressed in five European languages. We first motivate and describe the VoxEL dataset, using it to compare the behaviour of state of the art EL (multilingual) systems for five different languages, contrasting these results with those obtained using machine translation to English. Overall, our results identify how five state-of-the-art multilingual EL systems compare for various languages, how the results of different languages compare, and further suggest that machine translation of input text to English is now a competitive alternative to dedicated multilingual EL configurations.