Entity

An entity (or thing) is something that exists in the real-world: celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects and works of art are all entities. For a long time, more than four decades, we teached computers to recognise things by simply matching keywords.

Now computers, just like humans do, understand that a text like [Thubten Gyatso] is not just made of two words but, it has a much richer meaning. [Thubten Gyatso] is a person, more specifically he’s the 13th Dalai Lama who was born in the Tsang-Ü province in Tibet on the 12th of February 1876.

All this information – collectively shared in public sources like Wikipedia and Freebase – is organised in intelligent models known as Graphs that are helping computers thinking the way we do and helping us finding this information more quickly and even compute it (i.e. providing answers to question like “Was Trinley Gyatso his predecessor?”).

In this blog we’re using WordLift, a plugin to organise posts and pages using entities. Find out more about the WordLift’s supported entity types in the plugin documentation.

 

Andrea Volpini

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