---
title: "Entity Disambiguation with Web Links — Chisholm 2015"
description: "They build a benchmark linker from Wikipedia-derived data. 34 references, cited by 22 papers here."
authors: ["Andrew Chisholm", "Ben Hachey"]
year: 2015
venue: "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/Q15-1011/"
doi: "10.1162/tacl_a_00129"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chisholm-2015-entity-disambiguation-web-links/"
---
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# Entity Disambiguation with Web Links

**Authors:** Andrew Chisholm and [Ben Hachey](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ben-hachey/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/tacl/) ([Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/tacl/2015/)) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/Q15-1011/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/Q15-1011.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/tacl\_a\_00129](https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00129) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2177768736)

**Citations:** 70 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [22](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chisholm-2015-entity-disambiguation-web-links/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Entity disambiguation systems usually depend on Wikipedia's curated structure: redirects, article text, inter-article links and categories. The authors ask whether ordinary web pages that hyperlink to Wikipedia can provide the same signals for a knowledge base without such curation. They build a benchmark linker from Wikipedia-derived data. They then build a second linker that obtains the same four model types only from about 34 million web links: an entity prior from in-link counts, name probabilities from anchors, textual context from text around links, and coherence from shared linking sources. Both are evaluated on the CoNLL (Yago2-annotated Reuters) and TAC 2010 data. The web-link linker reaches 93–100% of the Wikipedia linker's accuracy. Its context models are actually stronger. Combining both sources gives a new best of 88.7 p@1 on CoNLL test. The authors conclude that any knowledge base with enough incoming links could support entity linking. They argue that organisations should publish their authorities openly and invest in gathering links, not only in curation.

## Key points
- Evaluation uses precision@1 on CoNLL and KB accuracy on TAC 2010, following He et al. (2013), so candidate generation and mention detection do not affect the comparison.
- Across configurations, web-link systems reach 93.1–100% of Wikipedia-based performance, about 97% on average.
- Web-link context models beat Wikipedia context models by roughly 7–10 points. Web-link popularity and coherence models fall behind their Wikipedia counterparts.
- Adding web-link features to the Wikipedia model raises CoNLL scores by about 4 points, reaching 88.7 p@1 and surpassing the earlier 87.6. On TAC 2010 the system scores 80.7, close to He et al.'s 81.0.
- A simple coherence model adds 1–3 points, with no complex global graph inference required. The code is released under MIT at github.com/wikilinks/nel.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [The University of Sydney](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-university-of-sydney/) — University, Sydney, Australia · 45 works · 68,350 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Andrew Chisholm and Ben Hachey. 2015. Entity Disambiguation with Web Links. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{chisholm2015entity,
  title = {{Entity Disambiguation with Web Links}},
  author = {Andrew Chisholm and Ben Hachey},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.1162/tacl\_a\_00129},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00129}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 30 October 2026*