What is entity linking in Azure AI Language?

Entity linking is one of the features offered by Azure AI Language, a collection of machine learning and AI algorithms in the cloud for developing intelligent applications that involve written language. Entity linking identifies and disambiguates the identity of entities found in text. For example, in the sentence "We went to Seattle last week.", the word "Seattle" would be identified, with a link to more information on Wikipedia.

This documentation contains the following types of articles:

  • Quickstarts are getting-started instructions to guide you through making requests to the service.
  • How-to guides contain instructions for using the service in more specific ways.

Get started with entity linking

To use entity linking, you submit raw unstructured text for analysis and handle the API output in your application. Analysis is performed as-is, with no additional customization to the model used on your data. There are two ways to use entity linking:

Development option Description
Language studio Language Studio is a web-based platform that lets you try entity linking with text examples without an Azure account, and your own data when you sign up. For more information, see the Language Studio website or language studio quickstart.
REST API or Client library (Azure SDK) Integrate entity linking into your applications using the REST API, or the client library available in a variety of languages. For more information, see the entity linking quickstart.

Reference documentation and code samples

As you use this feature in your applications, see the following reference documentation and samples for Azure AI Language:

Development option / language Reference documentation Samples
REST API REST API documentation
C# C# documentation C# samples
Java Java documentation Java Samples
JavaScript JavaScript documentation JavaScript samples
Python Python documentation Python samples

Responsible AI

An AI system includes not only the technology, but also the people who will use it, the people who will be affected by it, and the environment in which it is deployed. Read the transparency note for entity linking to learn about responsible AI use and deployment in your systems. You can also see the following articles for more information:

Next steps

There are two ways to get started using the entity linking feature:

  • Language Studio, which is a web-based platform that enables you to try several Azure AI Language features without needing to write code.
  • The quickstart article for instructions on making requests to the service using the REST API and client library SDK.