Place disambiguation with co-occurrence models.

Abstract

In this paper we describe the geographic information retrieval system developed and results achieved by the Multimedia & Information Systems team for GeoCLEF 2006. We detail our methods for generating and applying co-occurrence models for the purpose of place name disambiguation, our use of named entity recognition tools and text indexing applications. The presented system is split into two stages: a batch text and geographic indexer and a real time query engine. The query engine takes manually crafted queries where the text component is separated from the geographic component. Two monolingual runs were submitted for the GeoCLEF evaluation, the first constructed from the title and description, the second included the narrative also. We explain in detail our use of co-occurrence models for place name disambiguation using a model generated from Wikipedia. Our results place us between the first quartile and mean for mean average precision, this is as expected for a naïve un-optimised approach. The paper concludes with a full description of future work and ways in which the system could be optimised.