Toponym Resolution in Social Media

Increasingly user-generated content is being utilised as a source of information, however each individual piece of content tends to contain low levels of information. In addition, such information tends to be informal and imperfect in nature; containing imprecise, subjective, ambiguous expressions. However the content does not have to be interpreted in isolation as it is linked, either explicitly or implicitly, to a network of interrelated content; it may be grouped or tagged with similar content, comments may be added by other users or it may be related to other content posted at the same time or by the same author or members of the author’s social network. This paper generally examines how ambiguous concepts within user-generated content can be assigned a specific/formal meaning by considering the expanding context of the information, i.e. other information contained within directly or indirectly related content, and specifically considers the issue of toponym resolution of locations.