Cross-Language Entity Linking in Maryland during a Hurricane. In proceeding of Text Analysis Conference

Our team from the JHU HLTCOE and the University of Maryland submitted runs for all three variants of the TAC-KBP entity linking task. For the mono-lingual tasks, we essentially mirrored our HLTCOE TAC-KBP 2010 submission, making only modest changes to accom-modate differences in 2011, namely the requirement to cluster NIL responses, and the change in evaluation measure. However, our work on the cross-lingual task was significantly more involved, re-quiring development of robust, multi-phased transliteration software, use of techniques in cross-language information retrieval, and reliance on a Chinese-to-English statistical machine translation system. In this paper we describe our work for the 2011 evaluation and the re-sults we obtained.