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.
Development options
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. |
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.