Automatic Extraction of Geographic Context from Textual Data

Abstract

The amount of information on the internet grows exponentially. It isnot enough anymore just to have a general access to this huge amount of data,instead it is becoming a necessity to be able to use different kinds ofautomatic filters to retrieve just the information you actually want. Onesolution for the information filtering and retrieval is context analysis inwhich one of the contexts of interest is the geographic context. This paperstudies the problem and methodology of geoparsing – recognition of geographicnames in unstructured textual content for the aim of extracting geographiccontext. A prototype implementation of a geoparsing system, capable ofautomatically analyzing unstructured text, recognizing geographic informationand marking geographic names, is developed. Empirical evaluation of the systemusing articles from real-world news showed that the average quality of itsgeographic name recognition varies around 75-100%. Possible applications of thedeveloped prototype include automated grouping of any texts by their geographiccontexts (e.g., in news portals) and location-based search. Preliminary resultsof empirical evaluation showed that the average rate of its geographic namerecognition varies around 75-100%. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/csat.v2i1.13