  The current state-of-the-art Entity Linking (EL) systems are geared towards
corpora that are as heterogeneous as the Web, and therefore perform
sub-optimally on domain-specific corpora. A key open problem is how to
construct effective EL systems for specific domains, as knowledge of the local
context should in principle increase, rather than decrease, effectiveness. In
this paper we propose the hybrid use of simple specialist linkers in
combination with an existing generalist system to address this problem. Our
main findings are the following. First, we construct a new reusable benchmark
for EL on a corpus of domain-specific conversations. Second, we test the
performance of a range of approaches under the same conditions, and show that
specialist linkers obtain high precision in isolation, and high recall when
combined with generalist linkers. Hence, we can effectively exploit local
context and get the best of both worlds.
