Microposts are small fragments of social media content and a popular medium for sharing facts, opinions and emotions. They comprise a wealth of data which is increasing exponentially, and which therefore presents new challenges for the information extraction community, among others. This paper describes the ‘Making Sense of Microposts’ (#Microposts2014) Workshop’s Named Entity Extraction and Linking (NEEL) Challenge, held as part of the 2014 World Wide Web conference (WWW’14). The task of this challenge consists of the automatic extraction and linkage of entities appearing within English Microposts on Twitter. Participants were set the task of engineering a named entity extraction and DBpedia linkage system targeting a predefined taxonomy, to be run on the challenge data set, comprising a manually annotated training and a test corpus of Microposts. 43 research groups expressed intent to participate in the challenge, of which 24 signed the agreement required to be given a copy of the training and test datasets. 8 groups fulfilled all submission requirements, out of which 4 were accepted for the presentation at the workshop and a further 2 as posters. The submissions covered sequential and joint methods for approaching the named entity extraction and entity linking tasks. We describe the evaluation process and discuss the performance of the different approaches to the #Microposts2014 NEEL Challenge
