Placename Disambiguation with Co-occurrence Models
This event took place on Wednesday 06 December 2006 at 11:30

Simon Overell Imperial College London, and KMi, The Open University

My talk will cover an introduction to Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) and the advantages provided by indexing placenames as unambiguous locations. I will describe our GIR system which generates a large-scale co-occurrence model and applies this model to the problem of placename disambiguation. The data for the model is mined from Wikipedia and applied to the GeoCLEF corpus. An example of placename disambiguation could be when "London" is referred to in text, is it "London, UK" or "London, Ontario"? The motivation behind this problem is to make un-annotated data machine readable and allow users to query and browse data geographically. The talk will begin with a description of GIR, placename disambiguation techniques and the use of Wikipedia as a corpus. Then a description of my probabilistic models, using first and higher orders of co-occurrence. The talk will conclude with our findings on how Information Retrieval methods can be enhanced with Geographic
Knowledge.