Azure Entity Linking retires on 1 September 2028. Here is what to move to.
Microsoft is retiring Entity Linking from Azure AI Language on 1 September 2028 and recommends that users migrate or "consider other alternative solutions" (Microsoft notice). Named Entity Recognition, the suggested replacement, tells you that "Apple" is an organization. It does not tell you which one.
resolve() does. It is an entity resolution API from WordLift: send text, and every mention comes back with a stable Wikidata ID, or unresolved with a reason when the evidence is not there.
What you get by moving
- Wikidata IDs, not Wikipedia pages. A QID is stable across languages and connects to the rest of the open knowledge graph. Wikidata and DBpedia links come back in
same_as. - An honest "no". When the context does not support a link, resolve() returns
unresolvedwith one of four reasons your code can act on. A confident wrong link costs more than no link. - Your own IDs. Resolve against your WordLift knowledge graph first and Wikidata second, or send up to 5,000 entities with the request. Azure Entity Linking had no equivalent.
- Published results, losses included. On VoxEL, a public news benchmark in five languages, resolve() scores F1 91.8 given the mentions, ahead of Google Cloud Natural Language (89.9) and Dandelion (85.7). Read the comparison.
One example
Orange reported higher mobile revenue this quarter.
A name search returns Orange, the town in the south of France. resolve() reads the sentence and returns Orange S.A., the telecom company. If the sentence gave it nothing to go on, it would say so instead of guessing. Run it yourself, no sign-up.
Moving takes an hour
One endpoint, one header, and a field map. Offsets and labels map directly, scores need a new threshold, and Wikipedia titles you already stored convert to Wikidata IDs with a single API call. The migration guide has the request, the response mapping and the code.
| Feature | Azure Entity Linking | resolve() |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Retiring 1 September 2028 | Public beta, actively developed |
| Identifier | Wikipedia page | Wikidata QID, or your own ID |
| When unsure | Low-confidence link | unresolved with a reason |
| Your own entities | No | Yes |
| Free tier | Azure pricing | 1,000 free requests a month, no card. One request per call, plus one per 1,000 characters: about 160 articles |