Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions
This work addresses the problem of robust entity linking in specialized domains for NLP researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing pre-training methods.
The paper tackles the zero-shot entity linking problem, where mentions must be linked to unseen entities without labeled data, by proposing a domain-adaptive pre-training strategy that improves over strong baselines like BERT on a new dataset.
We present the zero-shot entity linking task, where mentions must be linked to unseen entities without in-domain labeled data. The goal is to enable robust transfer to highly specialized domains, and so no metadata or alias tables are assumed. In this setting, entities are only identified by text descriptions, and models must rely strictly on language understanding to resolve the new entities. First, we show that strong reading comprehension models pre-trained on large unlabeled data can be used to generalize to unseen entities. Second, we propose a simple and effective adaptive pre-training strategy, which we term domain-adaptive pre-training (DAP), to address the domain shift problem associated with linking unseen entities in a new domain. We present experiments on a new dataset that we construct for this task and show that DAP improves over strong pre-training baselines, including BERT. The data and code are available at https://github.com/lajanugen/zeshel.