# An Entity Linking Agent for Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03865 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03865/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 47 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [QuAC : Question Answering in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07036/) (2018)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06092/) (2022)
- [Simple Entity-Centric Questions Challenge Dense Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08535/) (2021)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [Learning Dense Representations for Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10506/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Neural Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07699/) (2018)
- [Deep Joint Entity Disambiguation with Local Neural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04920/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11644/) (2021)
- [Efficient One-Pass End-to-End Entity Linking for Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02413/) (2020)
- [ReFinED: An Efficient Zero-shot-capable Approach to End-to-End Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04108/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Stop Wasting Your Tokens: Towards Efficient Runtime Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26585/) (2025)
- [Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Some Question Answering (QA) systems rely on knowledge bases (KBs) to provide accurate answers. Entity Linking (EL) plays a critical role in linking natural language mentions to KB entries. However, most existing EL methods are designed for long contexts and do not perform well on short, ambiguous user questions in QA tasks. We propose an entity linking agent for QA, based on a Large Language Model that simulates human cognitive workflows. The agent actively identifies entity mentions, retrieves candidate entities, and makes decision. To verify the effectiveness of our agent, we conduct two experiments: tool-based entity linking and QA task evaluation. The results confirm the robustness and effectiveness of our agent.