# MERLIN: A Testbed for Multilingual Multimodal Entity Recognition and Linking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07348/) (2019)
- [Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15032/) (2024)
- [Systematic Inequalities in Language Technology Performance across the World's Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06733/) (2021)
- [Entities as Experts: Sparse Memory Access with Entity Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07202/) (2020)
- [Question Answering by Reasoning Across Documents with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09920/) (2018)
- [Entity Linking in 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02690/) (2020)
- [Large Multilingual Models Pivot Zero-Shot Multimodal Learning across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12038/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Autoregressive Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12528/) (2021)
- [WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06347/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Entity Linking for Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03236/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Graph Augmented Network Towards Multiview Representation Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04831/) (2022)
- [Large Scale Multi-Lingual Multi-Modal Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06560/) (2023)
- [Generative Multimodal Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12725/) (2023)
- [Improving Candidate Generation for Low-resource Cross-lingual Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01343/) (2020)
- [Improving Candidate Retrieval with Entity Profile Generation for Wikidata Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13404/) (2022)
- [AMELI: Enhancing Multimodal Entity Linking with Fine-Grained Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14725/) (2023)
- [Multilingual End to End Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08896/) (2023)
- [DRIN: Dynamic Relation Interactive Network for Multimodal Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05589/) (2023)
- [One for All: Towards Language Independent Named Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01797/) (2017)
- [DWE+: Dual-Way Matching Enhanced Framework for Multimodal Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04818/) (2024)
- [2M-NER: Contrastive Learning for Multilingual and Multimodal NER with Language and Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17122/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces MERLIN, a novel testbed system for the task of Multilingual Multimodal Entity Linking. The created dataset includes BBC news article titles, paired with corresponding images, in five languages: Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Tamil, featuring over 7,000 named entity mentions linked to 2,500 unique Wikidata entities. We also include several benchmarks using multilingual and multimodal entity linking methods exploring different language models like LLaMa-2 and Aya-23. Our findings indicate that incorporating visual data improves the accuracy of entity linking, especially for entities where the textual context is ambiguous or insufficient, and particularly for models that do not have strong multilingual abilities. For the work, the dataset, methods are available here at https://github.com/rsathya4802/merlin