  Entity Linking (EL) is the task of automatically identifying entity mentions
in a piece of text and resolving them to a corresponding entity in a reference
knowledge base like Wikipedia. There is a large number of EL tools available
for different types of documents and domains, yet EL remains a challenging task
where the lack of precision on particularly ambiguous mentions often spoils the
usefulness of automated disambiguation results in real applications. A priori
approximations of the difficulty to link a particular entity mention can
facilitate flagging of critical cases as part of semi-automated EL systems,
while detecting latent factors that affect the EL performance, like
corpus-specific features, can provide insights on how to improve a system based
on the special characteristics of the underlying corpus. In this paper, we
first introduce a consensus-based method to generate difficulty labels for
entity mentions on arbitrary corpora. The difficulty labels are then exploited
as training data for a supervised classification task able to predict the EL
difficulty of entity mentions using a variety of features. Experiments over a
corpus of news articles show that EL difficulty can be estimated with high
accuracy, revealing also latent features that affect EL performance. Finally,
evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method to
inform semi-automated EL pipelines.
