Exploring Probabilistic Toponym Resolution for Geographical Information Retrieval

A key problem that arises when unstructured text is being queried is that of properly recognizing and exploiting geographical terms and entities. Here we describe a mechanism for probabilistic toponym resolution, and our experiments with the new method in the setting of the 2005 GeoCLEF queries and judgments. The new method gives improved retrieval effectiveness on a subset of the topics.

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