A New Entity Salience Task with Millions of Training Examples

Although many NLP systems are moving toward entity-based processing, most still identify important phrases using classical keyword-based approaches. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of entity salience: assigning a relevance score to each entity in a document. We demonstrate how a labeled corpus for the task can be automatically generated from a corpus of documents and accompanying abstracts. We then show how a classifier with features derived from a standard NLP pipeline outperforms a strong baseline by 34%. Finally, we outline initial experiments on further improving accuracy by leveraging background knowledge about the relationships between entities.