Geocoding multilingual texts: Recognition, disambiguation and visualisation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multilingual geocoding method that recognizes and disambiguates geographical references in free text with minimal language-specific resources, enabling automatic indexing and visualization on maps.

Contribution

It presents a language-independent approach for recognizing and disambiguating place names in multilingual texts using heuristics and gazetteers.

Findings

Effective recognition of geographical references across multiple languages.

Successful disambiguation of homographic place names.

Automatic visualization of geocoded texts on maps.

Abstract

We are presenting a method to recognise geographical references in free text. Our tool must work on various languages with a minimum of language-dependent resources, except a gazetteer. The main difficulty is to disambiguate these place names by distinguishing places from persons and by selecting the most likely place out of a list of homographic place names world-wide. The system uses a number of language-independent clues and heuristics to disambiguate place name homographs. The final aim is to index texts with the countries and cities they mention and to automatically visualise this information on geographical maps using various tools.