Map-based vs. knowledge-based toponym disambiguation

Abstract

Toponym Disambiguation, i.e. the task of assigning to place name their correct reference in the world, is getting more attention from many researchers. Many methods have been proposed since now, making use of different resources, techniques and sense inventories. Unfortunately, a gold standard for the evaluation of those methods is not yet available; therefore, it is difficult to verify the performance of such methods. Recently, a georeferenced version of WordNet has been developed, a resource that can be used to compare methods that are based on geographical data with methods that use textual information. In this paper we carry out a comparison between two of these methods. The results show that the knowledge-based method allowed us to obtain better results with a smaller context size. On the other hand, we observed that the map-based method needs a large context to obtain a good accuracy.