In natural language processing, entity linking, named entity linking (NEL), named entity disambiguation (NED), named entity recognition and disambiguation (NERD) or named entity normalization (NEN) is the task of determining the identity of entities mentioned in text. For example, given the sentence "Paris is the capital of France", the idea is to determine that "Paris" refers to the city of Paris and not to Paris Hilton or any other entity that could be referred as "Paris". NED is different from named entity recognition (NER) in that NER identifies the occurrence or mention of a named entity in text but it does not identify which specific entity it is.