Abstract Automatically discovering cross-lingual links (CLs) between wikis can largely enrich the cross-lingual knowledge and facilitate knowledge sharing across different languages. In most existing approaches for cross-lingual knowledge linking, the seed CLs and the inner link structures are two important factors for finding new CLs. When there are insufficient seed CLs and inner links, discovering new CLs becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an approach that boosts cross-lingual knowledge linking by concept annotation. Given a small number of seed CLs and inner links, our approach first enriches the inner links in wikis by using concept annotation method, and then predicts new CLs with a regression-based learning model. These two steps mutually reinforce each other, and are executed iteratively to find as many CLs as possible. Experimental results on the English and Chinese Wikipedia data show that the concept annotation can effectively improve the quantity and quality of predicted CLs. With 50,000 seed CLs and 30% of the original inner links in Wikipedia, our approach discovered 171,393 more CLs in four runs when using concept annotation.