Concept Wikification for COVID-19

Understanding scientific articles related to COVID-19 requires broad knowledge about concepts such as symptoms, diseases and medicine. Given the very large and evergrowing scientific articles related to COVID-19, it is a daunting task even for experts to recognize the large set of concepts mentioned in these articles. In this paper, we address the problem of concept wikification for COVID-19, which is to automatically recognize mentions of concepts related to COVID-19 in text and resolve them into Wikipedia titles. We develop an approach to curate a COVID-19 concept wikification dataset by mining Wikipedia text and the associated intra-Wikipedia links. We also develop an end-to-end system for concept wikification for COVID-19. Preliminary experiments show very encouraging results. Our dataset, code and pre-trained model are available at github.com/panlybero/ Covid19_wikification.