Entity Linking meets Word Sense Disambiguation: A Unified Approach

Entity Linking (EL) and Word Sense Disam-biguation (WSD) both address the lexical am-biguity of language. But while the two tasks are pretty similar, they differ in a fundamen-tal respect: in EL the textual mention can be linked to a named entity which may or may not contain the exact mention, while in WSD there is a perfect match between the word form (bet-ter, its lemma) and a suitable word sense. In this paper we present Babelfy, a unified graph-based approach to EL and WSD based on a loose identification of candidate mean-ings coupled with a densest subgraph heuris-tic which selects high-coherence semantic in-terpretations. Our experiments show state-of-the-art performances on both tasks on 6 differ-ent datasets, including a multilingual setting. Babelfy is online a