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Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking

arxiv.org/abs/2609.10745

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Updated 5 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294G4BJ6KMNFBE1K2EWAJBG

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 5 h ago
arXiv
2609.10745
T1 · 5 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 5 h ago

Abstract

Multimodal entity linking grounds entity mentions in text and images to knowledge-base entries. These systems degrade on rare entities, but prior work measures rarity primarily through popularity-based metrics such as pageviews. We broaden this view using knowledge-graph structural metrics that capture how well an entity is documented and connected. These metrics identify many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across the resulting rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, showing that different rarity definitions expose different failure modes. To address these failures, we introduce a simple, training-free framework in which a reasoning-capable vision-language model iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia, gathering evidence dynamically. Controlled experiments show that reasoning and retrieval are complementary. Reasoning alone does not significantly improve accuracy on rare entities. Retrieval without reasoning improves rare-entity accuracy but can hurt overall accuracy. Their combination performs best. On MERLIN, a multilingual multimodal entity linking benchmark over five languages (Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, Vietnamese), our best system improves over the state of the art by 6.9% overall and by up to 23.3% on rare-entity slices. We release MERLIN-Rare, rare-entity test slices for targeted evaluation, with our framework.

Authors 3

Parinthapat Pengpun, Simran Khanuja, Graham Neubig

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
new

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

arXiv id
2609.10745

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Categories
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Github repo
neulab/think-before-you-link

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 5 h agomedium

Hf paper url
https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.10745

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 5 h agomedium

Github stars
2

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Hf comments
1

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Upvotes
1

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PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

14

Source tiers

T1T29 / 5

Freshest observation

5 h ago

Conflicts

2 flagged