Microsoft Academic post: “Entity linking is a cognitive capability essential to human communication. It contains two challenging components: first, entity conflation, where we recognize that even though an entity is referred to by different names, it is still one item; and second, entity disambiguation, where we differentiate between entities with the same name and distinguish them as separate. When you read scholarly articles, you invoke your entity linking capability when you realize that authors with the same name are different persons, or that different versions of a name, as well as acronyms, refer to the same entity – say, a conference. As a research group working on artificial intelligence and on Microsoft Academic, we would like our system to possess and improve its entity linking capability so it can serve us better in discovering scholarship. This post explains how our group’s research on entity conflation and disambiguation works to make Microsoft Academic even more powerful for discovering scholarship. So, where are conflation and disambiguation used in Microsoft Academic? Let’s start with real examples….”