Abstract Cross lingual entity linking means linking an entity mention in a background source document in one language with the corresponding real world entity in a knowledge base written in the other language. The key problem is to measure the similarity score between the context of the entity mention and the document of the candidate entity. This paper presents a general framework for doing cross lingual entity linking by leveraging a large scale and bilingual knowledge base, Wikipedia. We introduce a bilingual topic model that mining bilingual topic from this knowledge base with the assumption that the same Wikipedia concept documents of two different languages share the same semantic topic distribution. The extracted topics have two types of representation, with each type corresponding to one language. Thus both the context of the entity mention and the document of the candidate entity can be represented in a space using the same semantic topics. We use these topics to do cross lingual entity linking. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can obtain the competitive results compared with the state-of-art approach.