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What’s missing in geographical parsing?

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Pilehvar, MT 
Limsopatham, N 

Abstract

Geographical data can be obtained by converting place names from free-format text into geographical coordinates. The ability to geo-locate events in textual reports represents a valuable source of information in many real-world applications such as emergency responses, real-time social media geographical event analysis, understanding location instructions in auto-response systems and more. However, geoparsing is still widely regarded as a challenge because of domain language diversity, place name ambiguity, metonymic language and limited leveraging of context as we show in our analysis. Results to date, whilst promising, are on laboratory data and unlike in wider NLP are often not cross-compared. In this study, we evaluate and analyse the performance of a number of leading geoparsers on a number of corpora and highlight the challenges in detail. We also publish an automatically geotagged Wikipedia corpus to alleviate the dearth of (open source) corpora in this domain.

Description

Keywords

geoparsing, geotagging, geocoding, NER, NLP, NEL, NED

Journal Title

Language Resources and Evaluation

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1574-020X
1572-8412

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M005089/1)
Natural Environment Research Council (1649558)
NERC (via Cranfield University) (NE/M009009/1)
We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Ph.D. Studentship NE/M009009/1 (MG) and EPSRC (NC and NL: Grant No. EP/M005089/1)