The Entity Linking (EL) task is concerned with linking entity mentions in a
text collection with their corresponding knowledgebase entries. The majority of
approaches have focused on EL over English text collections. However, some
approaches propose language-independent or multilingual approaches to perform
EL over texts in many languages. In this paper, our goal is to see how well EL
systems perform outside of the primary language (often English). We first
provide a survey of EL approaches that present evaluation over multiple
languages. We then provide results of an initial study comparing selected
entity linking APIs for equivalent documents and sentences in English and
Spanish. Multilingual EL approaches fare best for Spanish, though all
approaches still perform better for English text than the corresponding Spanish
text. This indicates that there is an important gap between EL techniques for
English in relation to Spanish (and possibly for many other languages) which
has not been addressed yet. However, we leave investigation of the causes of
this gap for future work, which could be due to many factors, for example, to
differences in existing multilingual knowledge bases.