Spatial autocorrelation and toponym ambiguity

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the spatial distribution of the referents of ambiguous toponyms and compare it to the distribution of randomly selected unambiguous toponym pairs. We show that for a number of gazetteers, ambiguous toponyms are spatially autocorrelated and that typical autocorrelations are similar to the size of document scopes for a newspaper corpus.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jochen L. Leidner , Gail Sinclair , Bonnie Webber, Grounding spatial named entities for information extraction and question answering, Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Analysis of geographic references, p.31-38, May 31, 2003 [doi>10.3115/1119394.1119399]
• 2: Huifeng Li , Rohini K. Srihari , Cheng Niu , Wei Li, Location normalization for information extraction, Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Computational linguistics, p.1-7, August 24-September 01, 2002, Taipei, Taiwan [doi>10.3115/1072228.1072355]
• 3: Overell, S. E. and Rüger, S. 2006- Identifying and grounding descriptions of places. In SIGIR Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, 14--16.
• 4: Bruno Pouliquen , Ralf Steinberger , Camelia Ignat , Tom De Groeve, Geographical information recognition and visualization in texts written in various languages, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 14-17, 2004, Nicosia, Cyprus [doi>10.1145/967900.968115]
• 5: Ross S. Purves , Paul Clough , Christopher B. Jones , Avi Arampatzis , Benedicte Bucher , David Finch , Gaihua Fu , Hideo Joho , Awase Khirni Syed , Subodh Vaid , Bisheng Yang, The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, v.21 n.7, p.717-745, January 2007 [doi>10.1080/13658810601169840]
• 6: Erik Rauch , Michael Bukatin , Kenneth Baker, A confidence-based framework for disambiguating geographic terms, Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Analysis of geographic references, p.50-54, May 31, 2003 [doi>10.3115/1119394.1119402]
• 7: David A. Smith , Gregory Crane, Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library, Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.127-136, September 04-09, 2001
• 8: David A. Smith , Gideon S. Mann, Bootstrapping toponym classifiers, Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Analysis of geographic references, p.45-49, May 31, 2003 [doi>10.3115/1119394.1119401]

INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Linguistic processing; Indexing methods

General Terms:
Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
distance, gir, toponym disambiguation, toponym resolution