Joint Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation

Extracting named entities in text and linking extracted names to a given knowledge base are fundamental tasks in applications for text understanding. Existing systems typically run a named entity recognition (NER) model to extract entity names first, then run an entity linking model to link extracted names to a knowledge base. NER and linking models are usually trained separately, and the mutual dependency between the two tasks is ignored. We propose JERL, Joint Entity Recognition and Linking, to jointly model NER and linking tasks and capture the mutual dependency between them. It allows the information from each task to improve the performance of the other. To the best of our knowledge, JERL is the first model to jointly optimize NER and linking tasks together completely. In experiments on the CoNLL’03/AIDA data set, JERL outperforms state-of-art NER and linking systems, and we find improvements of 0.4% absolute F1 for NER on CoNLL’03, and 0.36% absolute precision@1 for linking on AIDA.