Pedro Ruas, a former PhD student at LASIGE has been awarded by has been awarded by FCiências.ID for the excellence of his PhD thesis in Computer Science and Engineering. The PhD thesis has the title “Deep Semantic Entity Linking” and was defended in 2025.

The goal of the PhD work focused on developing methods for entity linking, the task of mapping entities mentioned in text to structured repositories such as ontologies, knowledge graphs and other knowledge organization systems, with focus on the biomedical and clinical domains. Specific contributions included a deep learning based method to handle the problem of NIL entities, which are entities for which there are not yet a suitable candidate in the target knowledge organization system, a new approach to leverage relation extraction to improve the performance in entity linking and a new hybrid entity linking framework that achieved state-of-the-art performance in linking disease and chemical entities to biomedical ontologies. Learn more about the thesis here.

Pedro is currently a researcher working at The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO).