M^3EL: A Multi-task Multi-topic Dataset for Multi-modal Entity Linking

Multi-modal Entity Linking (MEL) is a fundamental component for various downstream tasks. However, existing MEL datasets suffer from small scale, scarcity of topic types and limited coverage of tasks, making them incapable of effectively enhancing the entity linking capabilities of multi-modal models. To address these obstacles, we propose a dataset construction pipeline and publish M^3EL, a large-scale dataset for MEL. M^3EL includes 79,625 instances, covering 9 diverse multi-modal tasks, and 5 different topics. In addition, to further improve the model's adaptability to multi-modal tasks, We propose a modality-augmented training strategy. Utilizing M^3EL as a corpus, train the CLIP_ND model based on CLIP (ViT-B-32), and conduct a comparative analysis with an existing multi-modal baselines. Experimental results show that the existing models perform far below expectations (ACC of 49.4%-75.8%), After analysis, it was obtained that small dataset sizes, insufficient modality task coverage, and limited topic diversity resulted in poor generalization of multi-modal models. Our dataset effectively addresses these issues, and the CLIP_ND model fine-tuned with M^3EL shows a significant improvement in accuracy, with an average improvement of 9.3% to 25% across various tasks. Our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research.