Grounding toponyms in an Italian local news corpus

In this paper we present a study carried out over toponyms contained in an Italian news collection, in order to determine the degree of ambiguity of toponyms and how difficult could be to resolve such ambiguities. The results show that frequent toponyms are usually less ambiguous than rare to-ponyms. The resolution of ambiguities on a sample of 1,042 toponyms with different features confirms that ambiguous toponyms are spatially autocorrelated.