How to use entity linking

The entity linking feature can be used to identify and disambiguate the identity of an entity found in text (for example, determining whether an occurrence of the word "Mars" refers to the planet, or to the Roman god of war). It will return the entities in the text with links to Wikipedia as a knowledge base.

Tip

If you want to start using this feature, you can follow the quickstart article to get started. You can also make example requests using Language Studio without needing to write code.

Determine how to process the data (optional)

Specify the entity linking model

By default, entity linking will use the latest available AI model on your text. You can also configure your API requests to use a specific model version.

Input languages

When you submit documents to be processed by entity linking, you can specify which of the supported languages they're written in. if you don't specify a language, entity linking will default to English. Due to multilingual and emoji support, the response may contain text offsets.

Submitting data

Entity linking produces a higher-quality result when you give it smaller amounts of text to work on. This is opposite from some features, like key phrase extraction which performs better on larger blocks of text. To get the best results from both operations, consider restructuring the inputs accordingly.

To send an API request, You will need a Language resource endpoint and key.

Note

You can find the key and endpoint for your Language resource on the Azure portal. They will be located on the resource's Key and endpoint page, under resource management.

Analysis is performed upon receipt of the request. Using entity linking synchronously is stateless. No data is stored in your account, and results are returned immediately in the response.

When using this feature asynchronously, the API results are available for 24 hours from the time the request was ingested, and is indicated in the response. After this time period, the results are purged and are no longer available for retrieval.

Getting entity linking results

You can stream the results to an application, or save the output to a file on the local system.

Service and data limits

For information on the size and number of requests you can send per minute and second, see the service limits article.

See also

• Entity linking overview