Annotating geographical entities on microblog text

Abstract

This paper presents a discussion of the problems surrounding the task of annotating geographical entities on microblogs and reports the preliminary results of our efforts to annotate Japanese microblog texts. Unlike prior work, we not only annotate geographical location entities but also facility entities, such as stations, restaurants, shopping stores, hospitals and schools. We discuss ways in which to build a gazetteer, the types of ambiguities that need to be considered, reasons why the annotator tends to disagree, and the problems that need to be solved to automate the task of annotating the geographical entities. All the annotation data and the annotation guidelines are publicly available for research purposes from our web site.