Linking Named Entities across Languages using Multilingual Word Embeddings

Digital libraries are online collections of digital objects that can include text, images, audio, or videos in several languages. It has long been observed that named entities (NEs) are key to the access to digital library portals as they are contained in most user queries. However, NEs can have different spellings for each language which reduces the performance of user queries to retrieve documents across languages. Cross-lingual named entity linking (XEL) connects NEs from documents in a source language to external knowledge bases in another (target) language. The XEL task is especially challenging due to the diversity of NEs across languages and contexts. This paper describes an XEL system applied and evaluated with several languages pairs including English and various low-resourced languages of different linguistic families such as Croatian, Finnish, Estonian, and Slovenian. We tested this approach to analyze documents and NEs in low-resourced languages and link them to the English version of Wikipedia. We present the resulting study of this analysis and the challenges involved in the case of degraded documents from digital libraries. Further works will make an extensive analysis of the impact of our approach on the XEL task with OCRed documents.