ATLIS: Identifying Locational Information in Text Automatically

ATLIS (short for “ ATLIS Tags Locations in Strings”) is a tool being developed using a maximum-entropy machine learning model for automatically identifying information relating to spatial and locational information in natural language text. It is being developed in parallel with the ISO-Space standard for annotation of spatial information (Pustejovsky, Moszkowicz & Verhagen 2011). The goal of ATLIS is to be able to take in a document as raw text and mark it up with ISO-Space annotation data, so that another program could use the information in a standardized format to reason about the semantics of the spatial information in the document. The tool (as well as ISO-Space itself) is still in the early stages of development. At present it implements a subset of the proposed ISO-Space annotation standard: it identifies expressions that refer to specific places, as well as identifying prepositional constructions that indicate a spatial relationship between two objects. In this paper, the structure of the ATLIS tool is presented, along with preliminary evaluations of its performance.