Methods, systems, and computer program products for zero-shot entity linking based on symbolic information are provided herein. A computer-implemented method includes obtaining a knowledge graph comprising a set of entities and a training dataset comprising text samples for at least a subset of the entities in the knowledge graph; training a machine learning model to map an entity mention substring of a given sample of text to one corresponding entity in the set of entities, wherein the machine learning model is trained using a multi-task machine learning framework using symbolic information extracted from the knowledge graph; and mapping an entity mention substring of a new sample of text to one of the entities in the set using the trained machine learning model.