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Important
Entity Linking is retiring from Azure AI Language effective September 1, 2028. After this date, the Entity Linking feature is no longer supported. During the support window, we recommend that users migrate existing workloads and direct all new projects to Azure AI Language Named Entity Recognition or consider other alternative solutions.
The entity linking feature enables the detection and clarification of the specific identity of entities mentioned within text. For instance, it can determine whether the term "Mars" refers to the planet or to the Roman god of war. This capability helps eliminate ambiguity by associating each entity with the correct context.
Development options
To use entity linking, you submit raw unstructured text for analysis and handle the API output in your application. Analysis is performed as-is, with no additional customization to the model used on your data. There are two ways to use entity linking:
| Development option | Description |
|---|---|
| Language studio | Language Studio is a web-based platform that lets you try entity linking with text examples without an Azure account, and your own data when you sign up. For more information, see the Language Studio website. |
| REST API or Client library (Azure SDK) | Integrate entity linking into your applications using the REST API, or the client library available in a variety of languages. For more information, see the entity linking quickstart. |
Determine how to process the data (optional)
Specify the entity linking model
By default, entity linking uses the latest available AI model on your text. You can also configure your API requests to use a specific model version.
Input languages
When you submit documents to for entity linking processing, you can specify which of the supported languages they're written in. If you don't specify a language, entity linking defaults to English. Due to multilingual and emoji support, the response may contain text offsets.
Submitting data
Entity linking produces a higher-quality result when you give it smaller amounts of text to work on. This characteristic is opposite from some features, like key phrase extraction that performs better on larger blocks of text. To get the best results from both operations, consider restructuring the inputs accordingly.
To send an API request, you need a Language resource endpoint and API key.
Note
You can find the key and endpoint for your Language resource on the Azure portal. They're located on the resource's Key and endpoint page, under resource management.
Analysis is performed upon receipt of the request. Using entity linking synchronously is stateless. No data is stored in your account, and results are returned immediately in the response.
When using this feature asynchronously, the API results are available for 24 hours from the time the request was ingested, and is indicated in the response. After this time period, the results are purged and are no longer available for retrieval.
Getting entity linking results
You can stream the results to an application, or save the output to a file on the local system.
Service and data limits
For information on the size and number of requests you can send per minute and second, see the service limits article.