Geo-WordNet: Automatic Georeferencing of WordNet

WordNet has been used extensively as a resource for the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task, both as a sense inventory and a repository of semantic relationships. Recently, we investigated the possibility to use it as a resource for the Geographical Information Retrieval task, more specifically for the toponym disambiguation task, which could be considered a specialization of WSD. We found that it would be very useful to assign to geographical entities in WordNet their coordinates, especially in order to implement geometric shapebased disambiguation methods. This paper presents Geo-WordNet, an automatic annotation of WordNet with geographical coordinates. The annotation has been carried out by extracting geographical synsets from WordNet, together with their holonyms and hypernyms, and comparing them to the entries in the Wikipedia-World geographical database. A weight was calculated for each of the candidate annotations, on the basis of matches found between the database entries and synset gloss, holonyms and hypernyms. The resulting resource may be used in Geographical Information Retrieval related tasks, especially for toponym disambiguation.