The titles of customized topographic maps constitute a specific corpus which is characterized by a very significant number of place names and spelling variations. This paper is about identifying toponyms in these titles. The toponym tracking is based on gazetteers as well as light parsing according to patterns. The method used broadens the definition of the toponym to include the nature of the ...

Toponym extraction and disambiguation are key topics recently addressed by fields of Information Extraction and Geographical Information Retrieval. Toponym extraction and disambiguation are highly dependent processes. Not only toponym extraction effectiveness affects disambiguation, but also disambiguation results may help improving extraction accuracy. In this paper we propose a hybrid toponym...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, such as toponym detection and resolution, are an integral part of most Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) architectures. Without these components, synonym detection, ambiguity resolution and accurate toponym expansion would not be possible. However, there are many important factors affecting the success of an NLP approach to GIR, including topon...

Landscape descriptions in natural language, for instance from historic corpora, are a complementary source to empirical ethnographic work, for example to research exploring variation in the use of basic levels or basic terms within landscapes across localities (c.f. Mark and Turk 2003, Burenhult and Levinson 2008, Turk et al. 2011), on the condition that such descriptions can be linked to space...

Geographic interfaces provide natural, scalable visualizations for many digital library collections, but the wide range of data in digital libraries presents some particular problems for identifying and disambiguating place names. We describe the toponym-disambiguation system in the Perseus digital library and evaluate its performance. Name categorization varies significantly among different ty...

Spatial named entities ground events in space, and this relationship is essential for advanced text processing applications such as question answering and event tracking. Toponym resolution is the task of mapping from an entity to a spatial representation (an extensional coordinate model), given the context. Whereas work on the temporal dimension is ongoing [17], to date no reference corpus exi...

The paper presents a study of a challenging task in machine translation and crosslanguage information retrieval – translation of toponyms. Due to their linguistic and extra-linguistic nature, toponyms deserve a special treatment. The overall translation process includes two stages of processing: dictionary-based and out-ofvocabulary toponym translation. The latter is divided into three steps: s...

This paper describes the process of annotating a historical US civil war corpus with geographic reference. Reference annotations are given at two different textual scales: individual place names and documents. This is the first published corpus of its kind in document-level geolocation, and it has over 10,000 disambiguated toponyms, double the amount of any prior toponym corpus. We outline many...

In recent years, geography has acquired a great importance in the context of Information Retrieval (IR) and, in general, of the automated processing of information in text. Mobile devices that are able to surf the web and at the same time inform about their position are now a common reality, together with applications that can exploit this data to provide users with locally customised informati...

Problem statement: The way of referring to a place in the geographical space can be formal, based on the spatial coordinates, or informal, which we use in natural language by using toponyms (place names). A toponym can represent several geographical places. This ambiguity made problematic its conversion towards a unique formal representation. Toponym disambiguation in text is the task of assign...