Placename Ambiguity Resolution

It is common for placenames to reference other named entities (e.g. names of people, names of organizations, etc.) and to be used as vocabulary words (e.g. city of Split). Apart from reference ambiguity, placenames are faced with the problem of referent ambiguity (i.e., a placename referring to multiple places). Many places are also referred to by multiple names (e.g. Netherlands vs. Holland). In this paper we describe an approach to placename ambiguity resolution i.e. place reference resolution, resolution of a document’s geographical scope and placename referent resolution. The approach is composed of three components: (1) geographical tagger, (2) geographical scope resolver and (3) placename referent resolver.

[1]  Ana Paula Afonso,et al.  Handling Locations in Search Engine Queries , 2006, GIR.

[2]  Nuno Cardoso,et al.  The University of Lisbon at GeoCLEF 2007 , 2007, CLEF.

[3]  Bruno Pouliquen,et al.  Geocoding Multilingual Texts: Recognition, Disambiguation and Visualisation , 2006, LREC.

[4]  Otis Gospodnetic,et al.  Lucene in Action , 2004 .

[5]  Fredric C. Gey,et al.  Berkeley at GeoCLEF: Logistic Regression and Fusion for Geographic Information Retrieval , 2005, CLEF.

[6]  Mark Stevenson,et al.  The Reuters Corpus Volume 1 -from Yesterday’s News to Tomorrow’s Language Resources , 2002, LREC.

[7]  Ron Sivan,et al.  Web-a-where: geotagging web content , 2004, SIGIR '04.

[8]  Erik F. Tjong Kim Sang,et al.  Introduction to the CoNLL-2003 Shared Task: Language-Independent Named Entity Recognition , 2003, CoNLL.

[9]  Mário J. Silva,et al.  A graph-ranking algorithm for geo-referencing documents , 2005, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'05).

[10]  Gosse Bouma,et al.  University of Groningen at GeoCLEF 2007 , 2007, CLEF.

[11]  Alia I. Abdelmoty,et al.  Ontology-Based Spatial Query Expansion in Information Retrieval , 2005, OTM Conferences.

[12]  Dik Lun Lee,et al.  Document Ranking and the Vector-Space Model , 1997, IEEE Softw..

[13]  Ralf Schenkel,et al.  GeoSphereSearch: Context-Aware Geographic Web Search , 2006, GIR.

[14]  Fredric C. Gey,et al.  GeoCLEF 2008: the CLEF 2008 Cross-Language Geographic Information Retrieval Track Overview , 2008, CLEF.

[15]  Jochen L. Leidner.  Toponym resolution in text: annotation, evaluation and applications of spatial grounding , 2007, SIGF.