Building a Multilingual Lexical Resource for Named Entity Disambiguation, Translation and Transliteration
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
In this paper, we present HeiNER, the multilingual Heidelberg Named Entity Resource. HeiNER contains 1,547,586 disambiguated English Named Entities together with translations and transliterations to 15 languages. Our work builds on the approach described in (Bunescu and Pasca, 2006), yet extends it to a multilingual dimension. Translating Named Entities into the various target languages is carried out by exploiting crosslingual information contained in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. In addition, HeiNER provides linguistic contexts for every NE in all target languages which makes it a valuable resource for multilingual Named Entity Recognition, Disambiguation and Classification. The results of our evaluation against the assessments of human annotators yield a high precision of 0.95 for the NEs we extract from the English Wikipedia. These source language NEs are thus very reliable seeds for our multilingual NE translation method.