candidates: Get candidate entities for text

API: dbpedia-spotlight.org:dbpedia-spotlight-api
Endpoint: /candidates
Response format: application/json
Auth: unknown
Method: GET
Last Status: 200
Latency: 905ms

Description

Returns multiple candidate entities for each surface form, including contextual scores and final scores. Use this when you want to see all possible entity candidates before the disambiguation step.

From spec: A 2-step process: Spotting and Candidate Mapping. Returns multiple candidate entities for each surface form without full disambiguation.

Usage Tips

- The 'text' parameter is required - Confidence parameter filters candidates by relevance threshold - Returns contextualScore, priorScore, and finalScore for each candidate - Lower confidence values return more candidates but may include false positives

Parameters (7)

confidence (number, query, optional)

Confidence score threshold for disambiguation/linking (0.0-1.0)

Constraints: {'minimum': 0, 'maximum': 1}

policy (string, query, optional)

Filtering policy: 'whitelist' selects entities matching types, 'blacklist' excludes them

Constraints: {'enum': ['whitelist', 'blacklist']}

sparql (string, query, optional)

SPARQL SELECT query to whitelist results

support (integer, query, optional)

Minimum prominence of entity in Lucene Model (number of inlinks in Wikipedia)

text (string, query, required)

Text to be annotated

types (string, query, optional)

Comma-separated DBpedia types filter (e.g., DBpedia:Place,DBpedia:Person)

url (string, query, optional)

URL to be annotated (alternative to text)

Examples (1)

Get candidate entities for text mentioning Apple Inc. probe-gate

Demonstrates retrieving candidate entities before full disambiguation, showing multiple scoring metrics.

curl 'https://api.dbpedia-spotlight.org/en/candidates?text=Apple+is+a+technology+company+in+California&confidence=0.5'
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.dbpedia-spotlight.org/en/candidates",
    params={
        'text': 'Apple is a technology company in California',
        'confidence': '0.5',
    },
)
data = resp.json()
import zingu_apis

api = zingu_apis.api("dbpedia-spotlight")
result = api.fetch("candidates", text="Apple is a technology company in California", confidence=0.5)

for item in result:
    print(item)
const resp = await fetch("https://api.dbpedia-spotlight.org/en/candidates?text=Apple+is+a+technology+company+in+California&confidence=0.5");
const data = await resp.json();

Probe History

Latency

Status Codes

TimeStatusLatencySize
2026-04-16 03:43:35.491382 200 905ms
2026-04-15 01:09:07.854340 200 916ms
2026-04-14 02:59:01.022645 200 897ms
2026-04-12 12:46:35.649847 200 627ms
2026-04-10 01:16:34.288642 200 1215ms