Geocoding multilingual texts: Recognition, disambiguation and visualisation

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.