Papers › Bootleg: Chasing the Tail with Self-Supervised Named Entity Disambiguation

Bootleg: Chasing the Tail with Self-Supervised Named Entity Disambiguation

20 Oct 2020arXiv:2010.10363archive 2025-07-28

Laurel Orr, Megan Leszczynski, Simran Arora, Sen Wu, Neel Guha, Xiao Ling, Christopher Re

A challenge for named entity disambiguation (NED), the task of mapping textual mentions to entities in a knowledge base, is how to disambiguate entities that appear rarely in the training data, termed tail entities. Humans use subtle reasoning patterns based on knowledge of entity facts, relations, and types to disambiguate unfamiliar entities. Inspired by these patterns, we introduce Bootleg, a self-supervised NED system that is explicitly grounded in reasoning patterns for disambiguation. We define core reasoning patterns for disambiguation, create a learning procedure to encourage the self-supervised model to learn the patterns, and show how to use weak supervision to enhance the signals in the training data. Encoding the reasoning patterns in a simple Transformer architecture, Bootleg meets or exceeds state-of-the-art on three NED benchmarks. We further show that the learned representations from Bootleg successfully transfer to other non-disambiguation tasks that require entity-based knowledge: we set a new state-of-the-art in the popular TACRED relation extraction task by 1.0 F1 points and demonstrate up to 8% performance lift in highly optimized production search and assistant tasks at a major technology company

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extract_context HazyResearch/bootleg/bootleg/dataset.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e214b7ab4ffe79fd · report
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get_structural_entity_str HazyResearch/bootleg/bootleg/dataset.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 83f6ea3829a9bba3 · report

Tasks

Entity DisambiguationRelation Extraction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Entity Disambiguation AIDA-CoNLL Bootleg Micro-F1 96.8 #19 of 20 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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