---
title: "Cross-lingual Wikification Using Multilingual Embeddings (2016)"
description: "Tsai and Roth address cross-lingual Wikification: linking entity mentions in non-English documents to… 28 references, cited by 50 papers here."
authors: ["Chen-Tse Tsai", "Dan Roth"]
year: 2016
venue: "Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N16-1072/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/n16-1072"
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/tsai-2016-cross-lingual-wikification-multilingual-embeddings/"
---
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# Cross-lingual Wikification Using Multilingual Embeddings

**Authors:** [Chen-Tse Tsai](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chen-tse-tsai/) and [Dan Roth](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dan-roth/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/) ([NAACL 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/2016/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N16-1072/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N16-1072.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/n16-1072](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-1072) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2461871142)

**Citations:** 107 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [50](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tsai-2016-cross-lingual-wikification-multilingual-embeddings/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Tsai and Roth address cross-lingual Wikification: linking entity mentions in non-English documents to the matching English Wikipedia titles. The method does not depend on machine translation or parallel corpora, so it can be applied to any language that has a Wikipedia edition. Their system, WikiME, works in three steps:

1. It learns monolingual skip-gram embeddings for each language. Before training, hyperlinked anchor text is replaced with the target title, so words and titles share one vector space.
2. It projects foreign and English embeddings into a common space with CCA. Inter-language title links serve as the bilingual dictionary instead of parallel text.
3. A ranker trained on Wikipedia scores English title candidates using cross-lingual similarity features.

The authors built a new, difficult evaluation set from Wikipedia covering 12 languages, on which WikiME beats several baselines. On TAC KBP2015 Entity Linking it is competitive with the top Spanish and Chinese systems, even though those systems relied on translation. This makes the approach promising for low-resource languages.

## Key points
- Monolingual embeddings follow the "Alignment by Wikipedia Anchors" model of Wang et al. (2014), trained with skip-gram.
- The cross-lingual projection follows the CCA approach of Faruqui and Dyer (2014). The usual translation dictionary is replaced by Wikipedia title alignments, so only Wikipedia articles and inter-language links are needed.
- Ranking features include:
  - the link statistics Pr(c|m) and Pr(m|c);
  - cosine similarity between the candidate title embedding and local context windows of 30, 100 and 200 words;
  - similarity to other mentions in the document;
  - similarity to previously linked titles.
- Candidate generation looks only at the mention's surface form. Titles that exist solely in English Wikipedia are out of scope; the authors name transliteration-based candidate generation as future work.
- Evaluation uses a new 12-language Wikipedia dataset and TAC KBP2015 (Spanish, Chinese), where WikiME reaches state-of-the-art level.

*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

- [University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign/) — University, Urbana, United States · 108 works · 67,432 citations

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🧭 Topics (1): [🌍 Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/) · 465 works

## Cite

Cite as: Chen-Tse Tsai and Dan Roth. 2016. Cross-lingual Wikification Using Multilingual Embeddings. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tsai2016cross,
  title = {{Cross-lingual Wikification Using Multilingual Embeddings}},
  author = {Chen-Tse Tsai and Dan Roth},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/n16-1072},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-1072}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 24 October 2026*