See ACL Anthology - Entity linking
Most EL systems use a “name dictionary” or “alias table,” which is a list from strings to candidate entities they might refer to. These are usually created using rule-based heuristics, such as running a string edit distance between entities in the knowledge graph and the train, dev and test set text beforehand (this is too slow for an online system). The papers in this section describe methods of finding candidate entities (and perhaps also linking them at the same time).