Abstract: Within the context of Twitter analytics, the notion of implicit entity linking has recently been introduced to refer to the identification of a named entity, which is central to the topic of the tweet, but whose surface form is not present in the tweet itself. Compared to traditional forms of entity linking where the linking process revolves around an identified surface form of a potential entity, implicit entity linking relies on contextual clues to determine whether an implicit entity is present within a given tweet and if so, which entity is being referenced. The objective of this paper, while introducing and publicly sharing a comprehensive gold standard dataset for implicit entity linking, is to perform the task of implicit entity linking. The dataset consists of 7,870 tweets, which are classified as either containing implicit entities, explicit entities, both, or neither. The implicit entities are then linked to three levels of entities on Wikipedia, namely coarse-grained level, e.g., Person, Fine-grained level, e.g., Comedian, and the actual entity, e.g., Seinfeld. The proposed model in this work formulates the problem of implicit entity linking as an ad-hoc document retrieval process where the input query is the tweet, which needs to be implicitly linked and the document space is the set of textual descriptions of entities in the knowledge base. The novel contributions of our work include: 1) designing and collecting a gold standard dataset for the task of implicit entity linking; 2) defining the implicit entity linking process as an ad-hoc document retrieval task; and 3) proposing a neural embedding-based feature function that is interpolated with prior term dependency and entity-based feature functions to enhance implicit entity linking. We systematically compare our work with existing work in this area and show that our method is able to provide improvements on a number of retrieval measures.
