Mining the web to detect place names

ABSTRACT

With the aim to improve the quality of gazetteers for geographic information retrieval systems, we present a method to detect place names employed by people submitting information to Web resources. We investigate how often people refer to a place using locative phrases in web queries and address the problem of defining cognitively significant place names. We propose Web mining as a means to decide whether a given particular named entity is in fact a place.

REFERENCES

• 1: Maynard D., Bontcheva K. & H. Cunningham. Automatic Language-Independent Induction of Gazetteer Lists, LREC 2004, http://gate.ac.uk/sale/lrec2004/gazcollector.pdf
• 2: Adrian Popescu , Gregory Grefenstette , Pierre Alain Moëllic, Gazetiki: automatic creation of a geographical gazetteer, Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, June 16-20, 2008, Pittsburgh PA, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1378889.1378906]
• 3: Purves, R., P. Clough, and H. Joho. Identifying imprecise regions for geographic information retrieval using the Web. GISRUK2005.
• 4: Tezuka, T.; Yokota, Y.; Iwaihara, M. & Tanaka, K. Extraction of Cognitivley-Significant Place Names and Regions from Web-based Physical Proximity Co-occurences, WISE 2004, LNCS 3306, Springer, 113--124

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement

Keywords:
gazetteers, vernacular place names, web mining