WordNet as a Geographical Information Resource

Geographical entities often appears in very different forms in text collections, such as when a foreign name is used instead of the English one, or when the citation of some region or place omits the name of a larger geographical entity containing them. This is a known problem in the field of Information Retrieval. The use of an ontology like WordNet can help in addressing this issue. In this paper we propose an automatic method to expand the geographical terms in queries by using the WordNet ontology and another method that expands the terms during the indexing phase. The proposed methods exploits the synonymy, meronymy and holonymy relationships provided by WordNet, together with some information extracted from the gloss.