Geographical information recognition and visualization in texts written in various languages

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe a system that recognises place names in natural language text and produces geographic maps and animations showing the geographical coverage of texts about a certain subject as it changes over time. As the system is built to analyse texts in many different languages, it restricts the usage of linguistic analysis tools to the minimum. Instead, it relies on a gazetteer containing place names in different languages and uses heuristics for disambiguation purposes.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
GIS, data mining, named entity recognition, natural language processing, place name recognition