Exploring Probabilistic Toponym Resolution for Geographical Information Retrieval

Yi Li
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Nicola Stokes
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Lawrence Cavedon
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Status

Proc. SIGIR Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval, Seattle, Washington, August 2006, pages 17-22.

Abstract

A key problem that arises when unstructured text is being queried is that of properly recognizing and exploiting geographical terms and entities. Here we describe a mechanism for probabilistic toponym resolution, and our experiments with the new method in the setting of the 2005 GeoCLEF queries and judgments. The new method gives improved retrieval effectiveness on a subset of the topics.

Full text

http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir06/papers/individual/li.pdf